Will be interesting to see where this goes in the next 10 years. IMHO Azure SQL and other cloud offerings are a better fit for smaller companies. Once you get too big, it is probably advantageous to roll your own. I am not surprised to see the pricing strategy to be complicated and obfuscated. My wager is that in years time the key benefit will not be lower cost of cloud resources but rather speed and no startup costs for infrastructure and staff.