Client wants 'the cloud' on a $5 VPS budget

A prospective client for my Contabo reseller account has requested "enterprise cloud infrastructure with 99.999% uptime" for a budget of $5 per month. I have attempted to explain the cost structure of redundant compute, but they referenced a competitor's marketing materials claiming "cloud power at shared hosting prices."

1. The $5 price point covers approximately 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, and 20GB SSD on OVHcloud's entry tier.
2. "The cloud" as a technical term requires distributed storage (Ceph minimum 3 replicas), redundant networking, and API-driven orchestration.
3. Marketing translation services exist for this exact scenario.

I am considering proposing a single VPS with automated off-site backups to Vultr object storage, branded as "cloud-backed infrastructure." Has anyone successfully navigated this expectation gap without losing the client entirely? My current draft proposal specifies the actual architecture in appendices while leading with the "cloud-ready" positioning.

I recommend requesting their actual availability requirements in writing; often "99.999%" is repeated without understanding the 5.26 minutes/year maintenance window implication.

I've had similar conversations with clients who saw "hybrid cloud" in a magazine. Windows Server with Hyper-V replica to a secondary OVHcloud instance — https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/vps/ — can hit reasonable availability numbers without the full cloud overhead. The licensing is the painful part, but the management tools are familiar to most small business owners. My suggestion would be to present two columns: what they asked for, and what $5 actually buys. Most reasonable clients appreciate honesty more than buzzwords once they see the numbers side by side.