Procurement gets handed a spec: 32 cores, 256GB RAM, 4TB of disk. So procurement goes to market and asks four vendors to price 32 cores, 256GB RAM, 4TB of disk.
Nobody stops to ask where the number came from.
It usually came from a server someone bought five years ago, sized for the worst day of its life plus a comfortable margin, that has run at 15% utilisation ever since. On-prem, that waste is invisible. You paid for it once and it just sits there humming.
Move the same spec to cloud and the waste stops being invisible. You rent it. Every month. The over-provisioning nobody noticed becomes a line item nobody can stop paying.
So the customer prices a like-for-like move, the number comes back high, and the verdict is “cloud is expensive.” It isn’t. The spec was wrong before it ever left the building.
The honest answer to “can you price this?” is often “I can — but you’re asking me to quote a guess.” The useful work (what does this actually use, at peak, on average, where’s the real demand) is the part there’s frequently no avenue to do. Procurement can’t validate a spec they were handed. The vendor who right-sizes looks dearer than the one who just types the numbers back. And the one who types the numbers back tends to win.
If you’ve done this job, you’ve had this conversation. Probably this week.