Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, all of these require that you be part of some accelerator or receive VC funding before you can take advantage of the discounts. Founders trying to bootstrap a company without external funding are SOL. It strikes me that these cloud hosting companies are really interested in businesses that value growth above profits and are willing to ignore startups who try to manage costs to get to profitability more…
BizSpark requires a 5 minute write up. It's comically easy to get accepted as an individual if you can string together a few sentences. Azure is so inexpensive even without BizSpark it's kind of amazing to me. Having done startups in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, what people have available now is incredible IMO.
I think they've just won favor of startups recently because they've been subsidizing their cloud costs. If theres one thing Microsoft has, its business savvy.