I fully agree that working with LLM is a huge expense and a serious investment. Such models require incredible resources not only for training, but also for maintenance - and even relatively small configurations cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware alone.
Even with the gradual reduction in hardware costs and optimization of work, the scale of calculations remains impressive. This explains why access to such models is often limited and why companies try to get as much data and experience as possible to improve the models to justify such investments.
Of course, LLM is not just a "product", but a complex research project with a very high cost of support.