The Dumbest Dollars a Cloud Provider Can Make

I never really thought about it but this makes complete sense. Why charge people to get invested in your platform? I guess it stems from the fact that back in the olden days these certifications were for things like A+ or some other non vendor specific function. So the ROR was almost nil for the certificate providers. However, in the "cloud" world, the income from certs has got to be infantesimle compared to the reoccurring income from platform subscriptions.

Or maybe the exam price is there to cover the administration of the exams. I'm guessing proctoring the exams is not free so they pass the cost on to the applicants. Either way, I think it would be cost effective for these large cloud providers to offer exams for free and just eat the application cost. Or offer the first one free and charge some small amount for each additional one.