I look at it like this: what else could I spend my money on that gives me as much as joy per hour as my sim for that cost?
Answer: absolutely nothing.
I can't even go out to fly for real without it costing me £20 in fuel just getting to the airfield. How much electricity does £20 buy me? at 25 pence per kWh, it buys me 80 kWh. My computer uses about 500 Wh, so that is 160 hours of virtual flight time. For £80/mo. that buys me 640 hours of flight time, but I'm sure not achieving that.
The problem with the whole argument about "cost of electricity" is that the propagandists have gone on so much about the cost, people have lost track of what energy they actually use. Most people use only what they require, and rarely ever more. The price keeps increasing, but I know for a fact I use about the same amount of power today as I did 10 years ago!
The question to ask is: if I don't spend money on energy, then what exactly am I doing with life? There is not a single thing we as humans can do that doesn't involve energy. The morons that want to control us know this, which is why they keep targeting energy systems. They want us living in caves.
At the end, all you can do is measure your POWER CONSUMPTION, and calculate at what price it really becomes truly unaffordable for you. That benchmark is when you have no money to cover the bill.
Compare the cost of flight simming to any other hobby, and you'll find that even the up-front hardware costs are modest, and the running costs are miniscule. My brother-in-law sails, and his boats are upwards of £5000 each! Then he needs to pay an annual membership fee and finally cost of fuel to get anywhere to sail them. Flight sim is positively cheap.
It sounds all nice to run an AWS server for all this remote processing, but it is in no way a substitute for local processing power. The internet is horrendously unreliable, and AWS is subject to processing delay that is transparent to the server instance, but measurable in real-time outside of the system. In fact, they can halt processing for several seconds, and your system inside will not know about it, but you sure as heck will sat at your house! It really isn't an option.
