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Vs a cloud provider where there are many companies offering such services, you pick one you like, make a deal, and then upload your file via some standardized protocol (http, ftp, scp, etc)

Not seeing the difference.

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"Making a deal" here refers to two people interacting in the terms of "Make a offer" -> Waiting time -> "Other party accepts offer" -> Waiting time -> "Upload files" while companies offering file storage is more like "Make subscription service people can sign up to" -> "Someone subscribes" -> "Upload files".

Cloud services regularly make deals with customers. In fact it would be considered unusual for a non trivial customer to pay list price.

The people who pay full cost are the customers who are so small that its not worth the cloud vendors time to care about.

Ok, if you don't realize the difference between subscribing to a service (S3) and making deals (Filecoin), then that's up to you. No one can say I didn't try. In the end, it doesn't even matter, people use whatever fits their use case, including you and me. I'll stick with subscribing to services, and you can continue striking deals, or whatever.

I think you've never used cloud providers at scale.

You don't just subscribe. You negotiate and haggle. Contracts exchange hands. Humans are involved on both sids. Its not like there is a fixed price you just pay.

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