That's the beauty of most tech based work. The actual labor isn't "real" and associated costs are whatever the market will bear.

I worked for a photography studio that did almost all of the school photography work in NE Ohio. I was paid a pittance in relation to the profits the owner was raking in.

One of my primary responsibilities was cleaning up school rosters... removing duplicate entries, spelling errors, non-printing characters etc.

They had us going through the rosters manually doing this work. I made a suite of Excel scripts and macros that automated 97% of the work. I took work that would have taken 60-120 minutes to complete and literally made it a try 2 minute job. My boss used this as an opportunity to increase his prices and fire me for an unrelated mistake that I didn't even make.

This is the same boss who tried to give me advice when I turned 40 by saying "a man's boat should never be less in footage than his age". Because apparently every 40 year old has the ability to buy not only A SINGLE PLEASURE BOAT, but is able to buy a new pleasure boat every year that is a single foot longer.

This is the same boss who only hired "temporary" staff through a series of dubious sources, so he didn't have any actual staff and never had to pay insurance or any other kind of benefits.

And yet when these greedy fucks can't stop their turnover it's our fault for not wanting to work for these people.