> the more common/sane thing is cheaper unit pricing as you hit scale.
Depends on the provider's business model.
Many devtools want to make it trivial to get started, and zero/low prices facilitate that. They know that once you are set up with the tool, the barrier to moving is high. They also know that devs are tinkerers who may take a free product discovered on their free time and introduce it to a workplace who will pay for it.
But someone has to pay for all those free users/plans (they aren't using zero resources). With this business model, the payer is the person/org with some level of success who is forced up into a more expensive plan.
This is a valid strategy for two reasons:
- such users/orgs are less likely to move because they already have working code using the system and moving introduces risk
- if they have high levels of traffic, they may (not certainly, but may) be a profit making enterprise and will do the cold hard calculus of "it costs me $50/100 GB but would take a dev N hours to move and will have X opportunity cost" and decide to keep paying
The successful "labor of love" project is an unfortunate casualty.
It's definitely a business model. Just like a dark pattern is a pattern :)
The counter to that argument is that it's creating an adverse effect on your most profitable customers, with an incentive to move to offerings that don't have free tiers (or where the free tiers are not considerably affecting your own costs).
If your free tier is so lucrative that you need to 25x the cost, then your free tier is too expansive and you need to tone it down until the economics make sense.
> The counter to that argument is that it's creating an adverse effect on your most
> profitable customers, with an incentive to move to offerings that don't have free tiers (or where the free tiers are not considerably affecting your own costs).
> If your free tier is so lucrative that you need to 25x the cost, then your free tier is > too expansive and you need to tone it down until the economics make sense.
It does make sense, though. That's how almost every subsidized system works, and the benefit applies for everyone until they scale to a point where they are not legible for it. It does suck for the pool of people that just began paying the actual price of the service instead of the subsidized one, and certainly more so if they're not actually getting profit from it but then again, it isn't like they weren't benefitting from the price up to that point, otherwise they wouldn't have chosen it. Luckily enough, as far as databases go, there's a gazillion options to choose from and experiences like this are invaluable when it comes to picking one with a pricing model that fits the scaling requirements of a given project, and not only the technical merits.
Also as a side rant, I honestly don't think "projects of love" are a good counter argument to anything. They're clearly not of love because otherwise they would find a way to make them profitable. Most people are either lazy to, or lack the knowledge of how to turn their hobby into a marketable thing. Which is fine, nobody wants to deal with business when it comes to their hobbies, but one can't have it both ways. Either your hobby project gets successful and you find ways to cover its expenses, or you realize that your hobby project needs to be kept just a hobby project.
> Also as a side rant, I honestly don't think "projects of love" are a good counter argument to anything. They're clearly not of love because otherwise they would find a way to make them profitable.
I appreciate the... tough love here, and also acknowledge that 'doing it for love' is ambiguous. But I strongly disagree that declining to make something profitable indicates that it's not out of love.
To clarify my own situation, it's more out of wanting to share knowledge with the world and build a community. It's a very popular site, ubiquitous in its niche, but that's about as much as I'll divulge.
I'll grant that we've been benefitting from the subsidy/hook up to now. But I'll also add the wrinkle that a substantial increase in bandwidth is due to AI harvesters. They are becoming an existential threat to projects like these.
> But I'll also add the wrinkle that a substantial increase in bandwidth is due to AI harvesters. They are becoming an existential threat to projects like these.
Hmmm. I looked at one site with a fair amount of traffic that I have access to and the user agents that identified as AI crawlers were not significant in terms of traffic. Low single digits.
Curious what percentage of AI crawlers your site is seeing?
I don't know about you, but I make many choices every day that are sub-optimal when viewed globally (or even across my life) but "make sense" or that I want to do in the moment. I suspect that is the cause.
> And yet people (devs) keep signing up for free plans.
Yeah, because devs are stupid. Because consumers, as a whole, are stupid. They're short-sighted and self-destructive. Just ask Marlboro.
> I don't know about you, but I make many choices every day that are sub-optimal when viewed globally (or even across my life) but "make sense" or that I want to do in the moment.
Yes, this is a fundamental character flaw present in every human, to varying degrees. Its a function of how our reward center works.
Exploiting that flaw for money-making is a dark pattern at best, and a crime against humanity at worst.
This right here is just a dark pattern. Using a vulnerability in the human mind for an exploit that, on average, extracts cash you wouldn't otherwise get.
Personally, I don't think it's that bad. But it is a dark pattern and I don't like it. So, there.
Depends on the provider's business model.
Many devtools want to make it trivial to get started, and zero/low prices facilitate that. They know that once you are set up with the tool, the barrier to moving is high. They also know that devs are tinkerers who may take a free product discovered on their free time and introduce it to a workplace who will pay for it.
But someone has to pay for all those free users/plans (they aren't using zero resources). With this business model, the payer is the person/org with some level of success who is forced up into a more expensive plan.
This is a valid strategy for two reasons:
- such users/orgs are less likely to move because they already have working code using the system and moving introduces risk
- if they have high levels of traffic, they may (not certainly, but may) be a profit making enterprise and will do the cold hard calculus of "it costs me $50/100 GB but would take a dev N hours to move and will have X opportunity cost" and decide to keep paying
The successful "labor of love" project is an unfortunate casualty.