You do see up front pricing. Please look harder, it’s there for every dimension they charge you for (instance type, network traffic, disk size, etc.).

Back to your analogy. You get charge for these other dimensions that vary when you rent a car:

- make, model

- miles driven

- toll usage

- driver’s age

- duration of rental

The more accurate analogy here for the GP is the person returned a rental car to the wrong lot and was charged additional days until they discovered their error.