Slow start kills the first months, hopefully zcash can get out of that or not.
Those, who are availing free mining at www.Zcash-Miner.com in the slow start mining phase, are the real gainer.Math would disagree, a 480x can pull ~160 H/s So for 3 months I would pay 2 BTC or ~1400 USD for what a $220 graphics card and nominally $180 in power would deliver. So I would be paying $1K for the service a markup of 2.5x.
Thus they would not be the "real gainer"
The cloud mining sites have to earn money. That is the reason for the mark up. I do not use those service.