Yes, we all read the article. The question is not how does Microsoft's free giveaway compare to that of AWS' -- it's, how much will that cost you in three years, once you've committed yourself to using those resources. What are you going to do after that, sign up again with a different email address?

They price match and offer between 33%-97% discount on dev and test as well as charging per minute rather than per hour: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/campaigns/azure-vs-aws/

Azure is completely price-competitive with AWS. In fact, AWS and Azure seem to be in a pricing war, lowering their prices anytime the other one does. They're both far cheaper than Rackspace.

...and seriously - you're worried about pricing three years from now with a startup?

You see, 3 years is a long time to grow and a startup where the co founders are developers, I hope we can get enough revenue at least to pay the server bills!