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I experienced this too, and landed at a smart company that paid me for the time I spent on the take home project. Yes, it’s less money than I might earn at a more prestigious company who abused my time, but I’ve also successfully selected for a company that has a good working environment.
They have an engineer for probably 30% less than what I demanded from another company with a dumb hiring practice. The dumb company was willing to give me the money too, but I was annoyed with their process so I told them I would not work for them unless they put a four day work week in my offer.
Id go so far as to say SaaS in general. Small startups are paying $5000/month to send emails and we’ve come to the point where inboxes are monopolized and if you don’t pay up to a cloud provider your emails end up in spam.
Take this and repeat for everything. Monopolize, ratchet up the costs, profit.