alt Hacker Newsyou missed the parent comment's point that the $500 training run was merely the last step, generating the training data is likely to be significantly more expensive and time-consuming. might still pay for itself, but it's not a trivial "spend $500 every month" decision.
My company wanted me to help them to fine tune a model. I asked them if I were working full time on it, never heard back. $500 is largely the cheapest part of it, but I know from experience, most people are clueless about data.
I worked for a billion+ revenue business where they didn't realize one of their key data hasn't been updated for 2 years, until I join them, and these types of screw up is cross business/functions/entities.