Best-case would be something I buy for <$2k (if out-of-pocket) or under $5k (if employer). Next best case would be a cloud service with a limited free tier. It's okay if it has barely enough quota that I can develop to it, but the quota should never expire.
(The mistake a lot of services make is to limit free tier to e.g. 30 day or 1 year, rather than hours/month; if I didn't get around to evaluating, switch employers, switch projects, etc. the free tier is gone).
I did sign up for your API service. I won't be able to use it in prod before your (very nice) privacy guarantees are turned into lawyer-compliant regulatory language. But it's an almost ideal fit for my application.
My only point was to, well, perhaps bump this up from #100 on your personal priority list perhaps to #87, to the limited extent that influences your business.
1) Privacy and security. I work with PII.
2) Low-level access and doing things the manufacturer did not intend, rather than just running inference on Mixtral.
3) Knowing it will be there tomorrow, and I'm not tied to you. I'm more than happy to pay for hosted services, so long as I know after your next pivot, I'm not left hanging.
Why free tier?
I'm only willing to subsidize my employer on rare occasions.
Paying $12 for a prototype means approvals and paperwork if employer does it. I won't do it out-of-pocket unless I'm very sure I'll use it. I've had free tier translate into millions of dollars of income for one cloud vendor about a decade ago. Ironically, it never happened again, since when I switched jobs, my free tier was gone.
This approach is very good if you want to spend several millions building a large inference server to achieve the lowest latency possible. But it doesn't make sense for a lone customer buying a single card, since you wouldn't really be able to run anything on it.