I would imagine the license costs for dev tools for a startup are neglible. If you run Azure you would setup test/staging instances and tear them down when not in use, again because of scale, I would imagine that cost is negligible.
As for usage costs, doesn't Azure use the same model as all the others, e.g. EC2, in that cost = compute hours (i.e. instance running) + data transfer + storage? So if by usage you mean ultra accurate per CPU millisecond billing, then I don't anyone does that? Would be great though. Happy to be proved wrong though, I'm no expert on this...
I agree that the dev tools license costs for a startup are/should be negligible, I was just pointing that Azure isn't a substitute for a dev environment (and it's licensing costs).
I also think that the problem of the production environment costs is a good one to have, nobody should fear to start a business because of them. If you can't solve that problem it means you have the wrong business model or really bad engineers.
Oops my bad, I tought others did the billing by CPU load instead of by hour.
As for usage costs, doesn't Azure use the same model as all the others, e.g. EC2, in that cost = compute hours (i.e. instance running) + data transfer + storage? So if by usage you mean ultra accurate per CPU millisecond billing, then I don't anyone does that? Would be great though. Happy to be proved wrong though, I'm no expert on this...