We really can't afford to do loss leaders before we have more of a business. It's already difficult enough to build a company like this, and that's with making money off of sales. I fully agree that in general, this idea completely makes sense, but you can only really employ it once you have a business to be able to absorb those losses. Right now, building and selling the current product takes up 110% of our time.
We're getting to the point where people are building large clusters of Raspberry Pis and the like for hobbyist projects, so I hope that within a few years, the concept of "full-rack level" can encompass hardware with hundreds of nodes small and cheap enough to be packed into a "rack" that still fits under a desk and sells for a couple grand.
In the meantime, I'll guess I'll have to settle for exploring your code and listening to your podcast!