The idea of every service charging $15-30 per user per month is a myth perpetuated by companies who themselves have that budget to spend out of their VC funding.
Evernote once had a valuation of nearly 2 billion, and like 400 employees.
I replaced it with Obsidian which gives me more value and it was mostly just made by two people, now they list 9 employees, one of whom is the office cat.
Each company for me was just syncing some text and maybe a few larger things like PDFs. The actual cost of that is pennies per year.
The problem is that they realised they could make more money by trying to lock companies into a proprietary API definition platform – they want the design, testing, QA, documentation, etc, all to happen in Postman.
I am not a fan of Atlassian products, but what retains them the most aren't the qualities of the products themselves nowadays, but the integration and plugin ecosystem + the difficulty of exporting the data. Nearly every tool has an integration for either jira, bitbucket, confluence, or all of them. And you would usually dismiss any tool that doesn't have them if you are an Atlassian customer already. Once you have set that up but decide you are paying too much for it, good luck good luck telling your users they will surely lose data/formatting/integrations when migrating to some other tool. This + having to train people to use another tool while companies usually take for granted that their users won't get lost in Jira (which really isn't true).
Ultimately it becomes more of a tax than a price.