[cimmanom]

Note that this is a valid and even necessary strategy if onboarding or hosting or support costs are high and variable (for instance, onboarding requires custom integration with the customer’s systems, performed by the vendor; or if you may have to spin up a variable number of servers to support their usage level; or for enterprise customers who may want to negotiate certain SLAs in terms of how quickly they can reach customer support via what avenues; etc).

Like many here, as a potential customer, I find this practice frustrating, tho.