I was thinking development costs. It's basically free to run a computer program. And the hardware is relative cheap too, compared to developing the software. I think it's really weird that the price of software is a race to the bottom, which affects the quality of the software, and kills innovation. "Software as a service" sure have artificial costs, like two orders of magnitude higher price running it in the "cloud" compared to hosting it on a service provider of your choice. But how else are we supposed to pay for the developing costs? Via advertising!?
The major cost for paid tiers is not infrastructure, but user support.