Sure, there are definitely cases where you can be frugal on unit costs. I think your examples are not very good ones, though. The cost of a kubernetes cluster

Sure, there are definitely cases where you can be frugal on unit costs. I think your examples are not very good ones, though. The cost of a kubernetes cluster while working on an MVP is not a unit cost. It's a development cost. If they don't even have the MVP yet, then I don't think it's fair to say they're going to pay a multiple of that kubernetes cost for every sale - I could be wrong of course, the details matter. Your second example to me seems more clearly totally fine. Those costs scale with the number of employees, not with the number of sales. If their sales scale linearly with their number of employees, they are totally screwed under the VC funding model. As somebody upthread said, frugality is important for traditional businesses, but not so much for software-y startups. $150/month is peanuts for their runway almost certainly, too. Think about it this way: even at a meager $50k/employee/year, their costs are 99.3% in the employees, and 0.7% in those software products. Or think of it this way - $10k will cover the $150/month for over 5 years, which is a really long time.