would you mind elaborating why you think their assumption doesn't hold?
I have a 6 year old, back then 400EUR (consumer price mind you) GPU that could happily serve 10 "normal" users. sure, we have to add other hardware too, like chassis, power supply, CPU, RAM, ssd etc. so lets 4x that.
Now we're looking at 1600 investment + power cost.
My setup comes down to 0.04 eur per hour of operations, so about ~30 bucks a month (mind you electricity is very likely cheaper wherever else you are). We also need maintenance and operations, eyeballing in large scale at ~2EUR/user/month.
On a 3 year amortisation period we're looking at
investment: 1600
monthly cost to operate: x * 3 + x 2 + 1600/36
monthly revenue: x 20
For x users = 10
monthly cost: 50 + 44.4
monthly revenue: 200
net month result: +105.6
net total result: +3801.6
i know i know thats a napkin calculation but if anything hardware cost will be lower for big providers, which would give them even more profits. just looks like a feasable business model to me.
as long as you can sell those subscriptions
On a 3 year amortisation period we're looking at
investment: 1600
monthly cost to operate: x * 3 + x 2 + 1600/36
monthly revenue: x 20
For x users = 10
monthly cost: 50 + 44.4
monthly revenue: 200
net month result: +105.6
net total result: +3801.6
i know i know thats a napkin calculation but if anything hardware cost will be lower for big providers, which would give them even more profits. just looks like a feasable business model to me. as long as you can sell those subscriptions