To your point about running your own K8S cluster - two things:
1. That's something you have always been (and still are) entitled to do.
2. Having personally run large-scale K8S clusters, the challenge isn't provisioning, it's maintenance, security patches, upgrades, etc.
You guys roll out a free service. You tell your sales people to hype it up as a benefit over other providers. You somehow don't anticipate that some users will "abuse" the free service, so you hike up rates for everyone?
Sorry, I don't think you're likely to find much empathy on this one.
Strange argument. It is basically what whole world do. Give some free or heavily discounted product or service in hope of gaining market and later on increase price / start charging for that thing.
It's not what the whole world does. Many companies gasp start charging for something right away! They're entire sales pitch was that it was free. People made decisions based on that which are not so easy to turn around.
It's a legal form of bait and switch and it's hardly accepted as an ok thing to do by consumers.