You're asking a loaded question. Companies spend money on acquisition strategies. Free trials are only a loss if they don't result in the acquisition of customers that justify the expense.
As to your question, at IndexTank we had a free trial plan that allowed us to host hundreds of customers on a single AWS instance. Why would you imagine that any company operating at scale would have to dedicate a whole instance to a nonpaying customer? It's the same as assuming that AWS would give a free user a whole physical server.
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You're asking a loaded question. Companies spend money on acquisition strategies. Free trials are only a loss if they don't result in the acquisition of customers that justify the expense.
As to your question, at IndexTank we had a free trial plan that allowed us to host hundreds of customers on a single AWS instance. Why would you imagine that any company operating at scale would have to dedicate a whole instance to a nonpaying customer? It's the same as assuming that AWS would give a free user a whole physical server.
BTW, CircleCI is not bootstrapped.
http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/circle-ci
That said, when we were bootstrapped (the first 14 months or so of CircleCI's life), we still offered a free trial.