I spent over two decades in the Army, I know what a weapon looks like. It isn't always bullets and bombs. I'm here to tell you: cloud vendors are using pricing as a weapon.
Not the kind that gets headlines, but the kind that bleeds organizations dry, quarter after quarter, while they're too busy trying to keep their systems running to notice. The major cloud vendors—AWS, Azure, and companies like Broadcom—have turned pricing complexity into a strategic advantage. They're not just charging for services anymore. They're weaponizing confusion, leveraging lock-in, and driving opacity to maximize their revenue at your expense.
Let's start with the 800-pound gorilla in the room: Amazon Web Services.
AWS customers report that 76% of organizations struggle to accurately forecast their cloud costs, with companies overshooting their budgets by an average of 23% (Monetizely). That's not a rounding error. That's a business problem.
Why does this happen? Because AWS has built a pricing model so byzantine that understanding what you're actually paying for requires a PhD in cloud economics. With over 200 services and countless pricing variables, AWS creates significant cognitive load for decision-makers. There's per-second billing (after a one-minute minimum), Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Spot Instances, regional variations, and data transfer fees that seem to multiply like rabbits.
The horror stories are real and they're everywhere. The founder of freeCodeCamp forgot to shut down EC2 instances for several months and woke up to a $7,000 bill (Cloud Toggle). One Reddit user left an RDS database open for three months—unused—and received a $60,000 invoice (Divio). Another developer set up a Redis instance that was oversized for their project and got hit with a $1,500 bill for resources they weren't fully using.
These aren't edge cases. They're the natural consequence of a system designed to be complicated.
Here's what really frustrates me: AWS has the tools to help you manage costs—Cost Explorer, Budgets, Trusted Advisor. But those tools exist because the pricing is so opaque in the first place. It's like selling you a map after you're already lost in the woods. The problem isn't that AWS won't help you understand your bill. The problem is that you need help understanding it at all.
If AWS is death by a thousand cuts, Broadcom's approach to VMware customers is a sledgehammer.
When Broadcom acquired VMware in late 2023, they didn't just raise prices—they restructured the entire licensing model in a way that forced customers into paying for products they don't need. Price increases ranged from 150% to 500% (CIO.com), and the new product bundles required customers to pay for items they would otherwise not want, need, or use.
Previously à la carte products? Gone. Products like NSX Networking, vRA and vSAN are now available only as part of bundles. Perpetual licenses? Also gone. VMware no longer offers perpetual licenses, forcing all customers into subscription models.
The result? Organizations are scrambling. Some are trying to align workloads around different VMware bundles to reduce costs, even though it creates massive management complexity. Others are evaluating entirely different hypervisors—Proxmox, KVM, Hyper-V—or accelerating cloud migrations just to escape the pricing trap.
This isn't value-based pricing. This is hostage-taking with a contract. They know you are locked-in so they are raising rents while they can.
Here's what bothers me most about all of this: these companies have stopped competing on innovation and started competing on contract complexity.
AWS isn't investing in making their platform easier to understand—they're investing in more pricing calculators to help you navigate the mess they created. Broadcom isn't improving VMware's virtualization technology—they're repackaging it into bundles that maximize their take.
When pricing becomes the primary competitive weapon, customers lose twice. First, you pay more. Second, you get less innovation because the vendor is spending their engineering cycles on billing systems instead of better products.
This is exactly why we're building ContextOS differently. Here are the key concepts we are using as we think about pricing:
Simple, usage-based pricing. You'll pay for what you use: CPU,GPU, RAM, and storage. That's it. No surprise fees. No hidden charges, no complex systems that require a flowchart to understand. You will pay for what you use, it will be that simple!
Complete transparency. Every billing cycle, you'll receive a clear report showing exactly what you used and what rate you were charged. Not a 50-page itemized statement that requires forensic analysis. A simple, readable document that answers the question: "What did I pay for this month?"
Cost controls that actually work. You'll be able to set spending limits directly on the platform. When you hit that limit, we don't keep charging and hope you don't notice. We respect your budget. Even better, we'll automatically descale resources when they're not being used—so you're not paying for compute power while your development environment sits idle at 2 AM.
That's not revolutionary technology. That's basic respect for your business.
Cloud computing promised efficiency, flexibility, and cost savings. For too many organizations, it's delivered confusion, vendor lock-in, and budget overruns.
The major vendors have had their chance to fix this. They've chosen not to. They've chosen complexity because complexity is profitable.
We're choosing to build something different. We're building ContextOS for the leaders who are tired of being nickel-and-dimed by their infrastructure vendors. For the teams who want to focus on building great products instead of decoding their cloud bill. For the organizations who believe that pricing should be a business tool, not a weapon pointed at their budget.
If that sounds like the kind of platform you'd rather be using, we want to hear from you. Sign up for early access to our beta and help us build cloud infrastructure that actually works for you—not against you.
The cloud wars shouldn't be fought over who can make billing more confusing. They should be fought over who can deliver the best value. We intend to win that fight.