There must be a market for less sweet sodas. I don't like excessively sweet food nor excessively sweet drinks, I like sweet stuff but not on the level must products are. It's really difficult (at least in my city) to find balanced stuff, most of the time I only have two options: regular soda or zero-sugar soda (even sweeter).

You'd think that there'd be mote of a market for less sweet drinks, but it probably depends on where you live. I really like honest tea's peach tea, which has almost half the sugar of most bottled drinks, and I can't find it anymore in the stores near my house that used to stock it. I'm guessing the distributor just couldn't sell enough in my neighborhood and didn't want to pay for the shelf space anymore, since it disappeared from a bunch of disperate stores within a week or two.

I'd also really be curious about how the seattle soda tax is effecting honest tea in general. I was mildly annoyed by the tax since it claimed to be a sugar tax but charged by the oz rather than per gram of suger, and also didn't effect starbucks sugary drinks.

I've taken a recent liking to completely non-sweet but flavored sparkling water like la croix. The best tasting one I've found so far is Polar Orange Vanilla, which tastes so much like an orange cream soda despite 0 sugar that it's bizarre.

I buy Polar unsweetened sparkling water. Comes in great fruit flavors (just a hint of flavoring) and is cheap, cheap, cheap.

I still occasionally have a Coke -- about once a week with a movie or something -- but my days of Jolt-fueled hacking runs are behind me.

I've seen something like what you describe in stores; I believe it was this brand:

https://www.drysoda.com/dry-sparkling/

I tend to just mix lemonade with water in ratios between 1:2 and 1:5, depending on what still tastes nice enough.