I was examining a Mesosphere deployment a few years ago and also found the pricing model to be difficult in a cloud environment, but the salesperson I spoke wit

I was examining a Mesosphere deployment a few years ago and also found the pricing model to be difficult in a cloud environment, but the salesperson I spoke with seemed more clueful than your description. We chose to go otherwise for a variety of reasons. Today, I think I would probably suggest to a Serious Company with a fully staffed ops/sre/devops team to run a pure Mesos play for the data systems with k8s on top or side by side for web systems.