Building on centralized cloud platforms comes with a steep price. Major providers charge $30-50 per hour for high-end GPU resources, but that's just the sticker price. Add multi-month commitment requirements, 3-day minimum setup delays, and exit penalties—and you're looking at roughly 10x what the actual market rate should be. Lock-in costs make it worse. For blockchain builders, node operators, and infrastructure developers, this gap between what you pay and real market value is worth paying attention to. It shapes where projects choose to build and how sustainable decentralized infrastructure alternatives become.