If someone wants to make 10,000 accounts, I'd rather it cost them 5 cents per captcha solve, $500, than for it to be free.

Some attackers can make it pay off, but many can't, so they don't try. That makes my life easier, as I'm the one being paged during an attack.

I assume attacker doesn't need the accounts immediately. I also assume that a real user will wait at most 10 seconds when creating an account on their old underpowered phone.

So the attacker could either wait 27 hours (10*10000 seconds) to do the attack, which for most attacks wont matter much. Or they could use some high powered aws instance that's 100x as powerful as the phone and wait a few mins (aws pricing aint that bad if you just need 5 min of compute time).

Yes it increases "costs" but not by very much and not in a way that scales