mmmm you're speaking my language. I bet it's a VM they are hosting themselves or a standalone utility server running just for fusion services. It's probably just part of their own currently running onprem network.Yep. The servers the apex and the app connect to are either rented by or owned by apex. They may be doing virtual servers and running on a cloud platform like AWS or Azure, or they could be physical servers hosted either in a datacenter or by Neptune themselves, I really don't know. There are monthly costs that they have to pay to keep that running though.
True, the amount of data each user adds is probably miniscule; up to a certain point, the biggest cost is just the baseline running the service. After the userbase hits a certain level, then electricity and bandwidth costs alone can become larger than the baseline itself. I don't know what the apex userbase is, but if it's sufficiently large such that the baseline cost is spread thin, a $10-20 a year sub would probably cover their costs. It wouldn't be a profit stream, but it would be a revenue stream that would cancel out the cost center.