Is the "managed service" era of cloud computing finally hitting a point of diminishing returns?

I was looking at our infrastructure spend for last quarter and it’s honestly depressing. We’re paying a massive premium for managed services (RDS, managed K8s, serverless functions) under the guise of "saving engineering time."

But here’s the reality: my team still spends 20+ hours a month fixing configuration drift, managing IAM permissions, and dealing with provider-specific outages. We’re paying "managed" prices but we’re still doing the management ourselves.

I feel like there’s a massive gap in the market for unbundled compute. I want the raw power of a marketplace without the "managed" markup and the vendor lock-in.

Have you actually successfully moved away from the "Big 3" ecosystem into something more protocol-based or peer-to-peer? I’m looking for a setup where I own the logic and the data, and I just "rent" the raw compute cycles as a commodity. Is that even feasible in 2026, or are we just stuck paying the "Big Cloud" tax forever?