Those cases are rare as hell, $150k should be enough for nearly anyone. You are making bad engineering decisions if you go through that in under a year.
The storage bill alone exceeded that at four startups I've worked with. When your job is to manage X PB of data with Y TB arriving daily, you're fairly constrained on the cost floor of your operations.
> You are making bad engineering decisions if you go through that in under a year.
Fine. You lack the imagination to conceive of a use case, or you lack the knowledge and skills to get the job doing it. Either way, this comment is rude and ignorant of the diversity of software challenges that exists in the real world.