I often try to do this, but it's rarely cheaper, and occasionally much worse. I recently bought a beach tent directly from the manufacturer, and when it showed up, it had a big Amazon sticker on it, and didn't actually have the product inside; it was clearly something Amazon had returned to them. Meanwhile, they haven't responded to e-mails and there's no way to return it, so, uh, I just got scammed.
I keep doing it anyway, but it's certainly not because it's a better or cheaper experience.
Sure, it's just a poor analogy. YouTube doesn't show up at your door unprompted as junk mail does. You go there intentionally for the purpose of watching a video. You can pay for that video with your time or your money. No one is being "paid off" in that scenario.
We finally gave up our Prius after 12 years, and we never changed the brakes once. The brakes were just peeking into the yellow on its last service upgrade. I was really impressed with how well the "normal" hybrid could take advantage of regenerative breaking, honestly.
I really like the DE0-CV in particular for having the 7 segment displays and accessible buttons and switches. When I was first getting started in FPGA stuff, I spent a lot of time just getting basic circuits to work, and you need some physical IO to get any feedback that your stuff works. It gives you a lot of things to learn on before you start worrying about VGA output or whatever (but does have a lot of interesting stuff on board for when you do want to mess around with that stuff!)
I keep doing it anyway, but it's certainly not because it's a better or cheaper experience.