Back in 2013 when the first Chromebooks were rolling out to education they basically subsidized the hell out of them. Google Admin and the licenses came free for the first like 1k or so devices if I recall. It allowed small districts to get them even cheaper and lessened the costs for us larger districts as well. It made it impossible to deny over a comparable windows device that would have easily cost 3x as much and more importantly it required 1/100th the work to setup and maintain. Plus GADS included a whole suite of apps that still had a cost on the windows side since O365 was still in its infancy and MS wasn’t sure how to charge for it.