Mia nodded. “And if they say no?”
He exhaled. Five grand. That was their entire server budget for the quarter.
“Just look it up,” his co-founder Mia said from across the table.
“We’ll do the trial,” he said. “We’ll work nights. And if it works—if we get the demo—we beg investors for an extra five K.”
Leo looked out the window at the rain-slicked street. He thought of all the things that five grand could buy: a used oscilloscope, a month of AWS credits, 3000 tacos. Or a compiler that generated code so tight it squeezed an extra week of battery life out of their sensor.
The cursor blinked on. The price was still there, hidden behind a contact form. But now Leo knew: the real cost wasn’t dollars. It was the moment you realized your dream had a line item.
“Well?” Mia asked.
The cursor blinked in the search bar: