At first, moving to the cloud felt like freedom. No more servers, just unlimited resources and possibility. Somewhere along the way, the hyperscalers locked the doors, threw away the key, and started charging ransom by the gigabyte. In this lightning rant, we’ll explore how we all became hostages locked into proprietary services and paying unpredictable rent. We’ll laugh about the absurdity, cry about the egress fees, and maybe start plotting our escape plan.