You are the one that claimed the prices of those shuttle services were lower than that of WaferSpace. 7k USD for 1k chips of 20mm2 at 180nm. Is it not the case?
There are over a hundred [1] shuttle services (group purchasing of test chips on a multi-project wafer) in they world. Several are even free, academic and universities offer them to students or PhD, some state sponsored in China and Europe, some start at $100, some very specialized, others as a 'sample' from big chip fabs, some offered on the cheap to get you hooked, tied in to a chip fab's PDK onder several NDA's.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=shuttle...