That's a world where megacorps and VC-funded fartups are the only thing left, and they can give you lucrative free tires because either they're FU big or they're just burning VC money to lock you in and eventually sell your data or extort the money from you once they've become dominant on the market.

I get where you're coming from; you just want free stuff. Understandable. But also understand that there are people who want to operate and support different kinds of businesses. For example, we might pay a few dollars a month for someone to host a git repo: https://sourcehut.org/pricing/

Offering service actually costs money, and it has to come from somewhere.

This is $7/mo before I even get to try it on real workloads though. There is no trial period or limited setup in which I can evaluate your system on a real (but simple) workload before grabbing my credit card. Surely you can see how that would turn people away...

Yeah, sometimes you have to shell out.

Anything that can run a "real workload" is these days going to be heavily targeted by buttcoin miners and other abuse. Any free trial is ripe for abuse, and it becomes a cat & mouse game to try to identify and stop them before they waste all your resources. Is that fight worth fighting for a small business? Probably not. Yeah, you might lose a stingy few potential would-be customers but that may cost less than the fight. I bet most of these small businesses will be happy to refund your $7 if you try their service, find out that it's not for you, and explain your situation nicely.