[manigandham]

That's absolutely not true.

All of these providers have multiple levels. There's a cheap option of usually a few hundred or thousand then the upscale option with 5 or 6 figures over a year.

We got into higher tier AWS Activate for $25k/year by just asking. Then we worked with a MS Azure evangelist to get us into the $120k/year program. We would've made it but declined because we asked Softlayer and they gave us $120k/year first and their network was a better fit for us.

Lesson: JUST ASK. There are entire teams of people at these companies who are working to get more customers onboarded and will do whatever they can to help you.

[blaines]

Who exactly at AWS were you asking? I talked to people at the AWS loft a few times and they said there was nothing they could do for our startup.