[danpalmer]

You certainly don't need to be big, even with AWS. I worked for a startup that was putting low volume through Stripe for a long time and we had one. You might have to "sell" yourself a bit, talk about plans, roadmap, future growth, but I think it's entirely reasonable for a pre-revenue company to get one.

Even if you don't get an account manager in some formal sense, going through a sales call and having them be aware of you is only going to help the process and increase the trust.