As I explained in the post - it is only "set to break even" at current difficulty. Unfortunately, difficulty keeps increasing and whatever deal or hardware you buy you usually have a pretty short window of time to get your money back. With the "pay to mine deals" they know that already - if the hardware was guaranteed to make a proift they would just operate it themselves.

Look at it this way - if the price of ETH is going up and you're relying on that to make a $ profit then just buy ETH - you're guaranteed to make a profit with zero overhead for buying hardware. If you are given the hardware or can buy it cheaply (I detail the numbers above) then you can still make a profit, I discussed that scenario above. But so far I haven't come across a mining contract that wasn't completely rigged to be less profitable than buying ETH in the first place.