I feel like there's a weird disconnect in the way that a lot of people perceive physical and digital infrastructure.

For something like a road, it's natural to assume that maintaining it costs money - after all, you can see the wear and tear on it, you can see the guys patching it, etc. Because of this, things like paying tolls are an annoyance, but most everybody accepts it as the cost of keeping things running.

For a website, though, almost everything is hidden from the end user. You don't know how the server is doing beyond "is it up or down," you don't know how big the dev team was or how many people maintain it, or what costs they incur... And so, people seem to be more prone to assuming that "it just works," without considering the costs behind it.