So what I'm envisioning are services designed for zero profit. Prices are indexed to AWS/Azure/Google prices; as they fall, the service's prices falls. Customers who need predictable pricing can buy long term contracts, as they do on AWS. Customers who use the service more, pay more, because the service offers utility-based pricing. The goal is to make the service as cheap as possible and maintained by the community. The source code and all data, except private data (e.g., API keys), is open and editable by the community.
Think it would be an interesting way to deliver services and data, just not sure how it turns into a business (since the API/service portion is designed to be zero profit).
There seems to be heavy interest in a low-cost service, even free if it was sustainable. Just curious if anyone has seen innovative pricing around services, similar to how open-source software made expensive software much cheaper or free, where the vendor made the main "service/data" much less expensive but monetized in a different way.