"Selling" is what I was getting at. When looking at the tail end of the funnel every other vendor is giving away drugs to hook kids when they're young. Tail distribution dealers can't afford to do this in contrast.

Another tell is that the ways to "prove" start-up status under most of the big providers' terms for cloud credit align more around "did you get VC funding?" than "are you small?" due to the longer lead time nature of bootstrapped start-ups. Most don't give you credits if you've been around 2+ years and soured on another provider. Maybe I just sucked at it but I was bootstrapping before and had trouble getting decent credit then.