I'm long gone and never signed anything so have no problem mentioning that we were quoted USD$150/m per vCPU core with a 12-month commitment (from memory).

The project called for a minimum of 4 replicas and likely 8 vCPUs per, so right off the bat that's close to $60k/year before you even do anything. Plus the unwelcome addition of "license anxiety" to the whole development experience, and being forced to make a big decision up front.. it's not how I like to work or what a startup needs.

Oh the joys of "Contact Sales" pricing strategy, where made up rates are no more consistent than "whatever the sales rep thinks they can extract from the business".

From what I remember, the cost per server per year was about 5x to 6x (annually) the hardware cost of a new server, and these were dual 32 core EPYCs. 64 cores per box at per core licensing gets really expensive.