> Preventing this from happening requires a clued-in CTO and equivalent senior level leadership who can defend against such 'attack' methods and knows the difference between, for instance, paying a monthly recurring cost to host a Linux/KVM virtual machine and paying for some totally 'cloud' SaAs.

And the reality is eventually you'll get a clueless one, and everything will revert to the mean.

And the mean is heavily influenced by marketing propaganda.

This is true, but making money in any business is constantly fighting against the entropy and regression to the mean. Also, maybe, just maybe it's an example of relative competitive advantage and paying more for the AWS is the right call.