I believe it's the same effect as micro-transactions in mobile games.
It's really easy to justify paying $1 for a small upgrade while you're playing. And only afterwards you notice that those $1 added up and have financially ruined you.
In the same way, $0.08 per GB (the effective price in the article) sounds really small and easy to justify. And we forget how they can accumulate...
Yes, but it's hard for a third party to weaponize that against you ;-)
You want to destroy a small startup with a free alpha version and AWS (or similar) backing?
Sure go ahead and send them tons of _legit_ (looking) traffic. This will first mess up their bill for this month and then mess up their statistics for the next month (when all the user they got disappear at once)...
It's really easy to justify paying $1 for a small upgrade while you're playing. And only afterwards you notice that those $1 added up and have financially ruined you.
In the same way, $0.08 per GB (the effective price in the article) sounds really small and easy to justify. And we forget how they can accumulate...