Just shows how much you are worth as a product to them, and how little competition is in the cell market, that all these devices can get lifetime cell connections while we are paying, how much a month? Actually, lawsuits about privacy for devices like this should quote how much the infrastructure costs are to support their tech. The network, services, people, etc are all a good estimate of actual value, in dollars, they are deriving from selling you as a product.

We use a crap ton of calls/sms/data over the same period, expect decent QoS on well performing bands, and have a TON more customer management and onboarding overheard over the same 5-10 year period. Meanwhile devices with embedded telemetry might get a plan as low as 500 MB total over 10 years and have hundreds of thousands in a single sale with no customer support overheard, SIM reactivation on new phones, etc.

Are you getting as good a deal? No, probably not, but trying to compare them to the cellular service you pay for is problematic in many ways. You too can get a $14 10 year prepaid plan from 1NCE for your Pi to send sensor telemetry from on occasion if that's what you want instead of "normal" cell service.

I wouldn't mind companies having to disclose everything and anything about the telemetry they collect though. Just putting the dollar figure on it is unlikely to shock anyone as it is low for you to do the same thing too.