Nah, it's par for course for startups for the following reasons... You can get tons of credits for your startup, typically hundreds of thousands from Microsoft

Nah, it's par for course for startups for the following reasons... You can get tons of credits for your startup, typically hundreds of thousands from Microsoft, Amazon, etc. -- Eventually you run out of credits, so you switch providers. I did this 3 times at a startup and got three years of free infrastructure. If you are selling enterprise software, then you use k8s so you can deploy at enterprise without having to integrate with all the wacky requirements. You can build a saas that offers isolated service nodes on k8s infra pretty easy if you just give everyone a small vm with a k8s cluster on it. If you use a scale to zero model, your infra costs are a lot cheaper. Simiarly the auto-scaling k8s capabilities are really nice and it's awesome to be able to easily build systems that can scale up massively. You never know when you r startup will get popular.