You're ignoring the massive ecosystem of vendors, managed service providers, colocation facilities, consulting firms, etc. whose profit margins are paid to manage most on prem deployments. Very few entities are doing it all with in-house staff.
There are a couple comments pointing this out, but that's not unique to on-prem: Cloud providers are also buying hardware from vendors, employing contractors, buying or renting facilities, hiring consultants, etc. All of that you are going to pay for either way.
The cloud just offers an additional middleman that also gets a profit margin.
Yeah but you pay one invoice instead of 100 invoices, you have one sales representative OK maybe a couple to deal with instead of 100s.
You get your support in one place instead of Hodge pogge of ... yeah we rent server from X but software that runs on it is from Y and in reality provider Z is support so now C has to agree for physical access to the server and now align stars to get all 4 working together instead of shifting blame around to fix anything.
Sure, you pay an Amazon employee to manage that for you instead of paying an employee of your own. Either way you're paying for that, and with the cloud you also pay for Bezos' spacecraft fantasies.
And you hope the Amazon employee makes decisions that are favorable to your business, even though they do not care about it.
