I think the article is less about grafana/elastic/mongo type scenario and more about closed source SaaS. We were in the "other side" of this situation a couple

I think the article is less about grafana/elastic/mongo type scenario and more about closed source SaaS. We were in the "other side" of this situation a couple of years ago in a previous startup: We were almost ready to sign with DataRobot what we thought was a shitty deal. We were a pretty established FinTech with a good DataScience team looking for ways to streamline our ML process. DataRobot was a good option but the terms were super crappy, and the "aura" of the company was like "though luck if you don't like it". Just about 1 week before we were going to sign, AWS released their ML engine SageMaker with the typical "pay as you go" billing. We lucked out and went with that. Not sure what datarobot is doing now but SM deffinitely cost them a sale.