ehhh...maybe our definitions of serious usage are different, but even then their EA based discount model is dumb. At our peak on azure we we're doing about $120k/month, but didn't bother committing to more than $200k/yr because the discounts just weren't awesome. last time I looked the discounts on more modern VM types were WAY worse than what we used to get on older generations. Also, once you are on EA billing all the decent billing/usage tools in the azure portal stop working (they aren't that great anyway) and you basically have to buy or roll your own.