That was an insightful comment, pointing out a pattern. - [A SaaS startup or established platform] has a huge marketing budget / money to burn when starting up

That was an insightful comment, pointing out a pattern. - [A SaaS startup or established platform] has a huge marketing budget / money to burn when starting up. - Early adopters see great returns because someone else is paying for a bunch of advertising for them. - They tell their friends and slowly the system grows to a critical mass where you're losing out if you're not on it. - Then they abuse their market position and do stuff like this. To put a name to this trend, to call them "subsidized services", makes it clear to recognize how much of business/software/web ecosystem is getting consumed by the strategy.