AWS, Azure, and GCP are already competing in terms of pricing and customer acquisition. If you mention to Google that you are considering moving your multi-million dollar project to AWS due to a better price point, you will almost certainly receive a counteroffer. However, it's not just the big players in the game; there are also many smaller cloud providers like DigitalOcean, which are indeed a bit cheaper, but not as affordable as bare-metal solutions (e.g., Hetzner).

I came to the conclusion that when you factor everything in—the time it takes to maintain such a massive infrastructure operating smoothly across the globe, investment in the further development of cloud services, employing security experts, paying developers competitive salaries, and of course aiming for a profit margin for the company—you end up with the prices that are evident among the major cloud providers. It simply isn't feasible to offer these services for much less (there are a few exceptions people rightly complain about, such as stupidly high egress costs). It has reached a point where Google, for example, has attempted to undercut prices to such a degree that their cloud operations have been running at a loss in the past[^1].

[^1]: https://www.ciodive.com/news/google-cloud-revenue-Q2-2022/62... (read last paragraph)