Depends a lot what you’re looking for in a seedbox. If you want to race then a lot of the options given are great. Personally I want storage capacity above most things and grabbed a dedicated server from Hetzner auctions. Today you’d be looking at 40TB gross storage for €60 a month. Been a long time since I’ve looked at setup options, swizzin was hot stuff then to give more of a “seedbox experience”

In terms of bang for the buck, I’d absolutely agree. It’s only when a company fully depends on the income of a single client, or closely aligned few, that this becomes a question.

It’s worth remembering a lot of these megacorps do employ people directly to work on FOSS projects. Here’s a quick and lazy example involving AWS
https://redis.com/blog/redis-core-team-update/ but Red Hat and others do the same.

I’m not a fan, and it feels almost as if by employing and embedding people in these projects they look to exert control over them. Realistically, I don’t see that as any different than if they were paying money directly for the same control. Except this way FOSS still has benefits after the license change.