Hi Franz,
yes I hear you, the cost of could providers is pain for me as well. I really hope that some one in SAP will hear us and in near future there will be on-premise based versions of NetWeaver published.
It is big loss of opportunity to not get traction of in-depended software developers, students etc for SAP. Those people may be interested in SAP technologies. They may try x-days trials on cloud but for more serious work they would need to have their own sandboxes...
cheers
m./