alt Hacker NewsNote that $400 a month is a typical car payment. For the same money -- well, OK, probably a little more -- you could be paying off a set of 4 RTX 6000 cards that will run 4.1 Flash all you want, all day and all night, at hundreds of tokens per second.
Electricity costs money.
And there's a lot of labour and effort involved in setting these things up and maintaining them. People don't even run their own email servers, even though the hardware side of that is trivial.