if you do the same type of governance, cloud is still cheap too (everything on one server)

Where the money gets wasted, is doing a different server per project, putting everything in different resource groups, and then overprovisioning those servers many times over. So much wasted capacity because of simple project structure preferences.

And then there is also the fact some features are locked behind more expensive models, which is also rarely cost efficient.

All I am saying is, if you simply create 1 database server on the cloud, with a database per app, and different schema's, isolated users, ... it can stay super cheap. But good look getting through an enterprise cybersecurity audit or ISO27000+SOC2 certification.