Earlier quoted context omitted.
A business wants to pay (at least) what something costs, because 1. they’re making money themselves from the result, and 2. they don’t want the thing they depend on to stop being offered. You’re not a free rider per se if you want a cost-plus pricing model but it’s just not on offer. (In that case, it’s instead the provider’s fault for not capturing your value surplus.)l similar to how, in scalping, it’s the original…
Google's business model is exploiting people's data to sell advertising. If you use a google "product" that's not advertising, you're not paying what it costs, at least in money. In line with what you're saying, I want to compensate a cloud provider for their services in a way that makes me a customer instead of a vector for advertising or data exploitation.
The problem with advertising is that paying for a product just proves you have disposable cash to pay, which in turn makes you a more valuable advertising target.
Amazon, for example, aggressively monitor the types of services people are building that run on AWS, and then to launch competing products as "native" AWS services - knowing that to the rest of their customers, buying the "AWS native" thing is much more appealing then dealing with any 3rd party vendor.