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I think the take is partially right in that people are too entitled when it comes to these things, but there's a reason why that is and there's differences on t

I think the take is partially right in that people are too entitled when it comes to these things, but there's a reason why that is and there's differences on the side of companies offering these benefits. A lot of companies do openly tout and incentivize people to move to their platforms loudly advertising their free features. And given that these are infrastructure platforms, they do that knowing very well that there is a certain kind of lock-in. If you create outsized expectations in your users in the name of spurring growth, you don't get to complain about them. I think Sourcehut does this in an ideal way. On the site it very clearly says that it's currently free, but as soon as it goes stable it expects users to pay, in fact they actually sent me an email reminding me of that fact. There's no shiny "we have all these shiny features, the first dose is free!" behaviour.

dspillett 4y ago
> I think Sourcehut does this in an ideal way. On the site it very clearly says that it's currently free And the honesty about alpha quality is refreshing. I usually find that someone being honest about that indicates that their idea of “alpha quality” is some distance better than what many claim to be “beta” or “release” quality! And not tracking (assuming this doesn't change in future) means that once you do pay you aren't paying twice (once with money, once with letting yourself be stalked by commercial interests). Self-hosted option too. Duly added to my ever-growing list of things I'd like to investigate but might never find time for…
belorn 4y ago
The keyword here is infrastructure platforms. When those change, everything built on top has to change with it and this create work for people. I could imagine what happen if gmail would suddenly become a paid platform with no free tier. Users would have to change very single account they got in the world that is tied to that email, and I know in some cases you might need to contact support (through email) or use a recovery password. A lot of peoples identity is tied to a free service, a "freebie" given by a for-profit company. I fully agree that users have some outsized expectations on free infrastructure platforms, through I wouldn't blame that on the user. User's don't generally have much choice in what platform their bought products is built on top, but it is them that feel the effect first when the bottom layer is changed under their feet.
- xialvjun 4y ago
  You scared me. Oh, my God, what if Google announced free Gmail user will be deleted in one month tomorrow.
buran77 4y ago
> they do that knowing very well that there is a certain kind of lock-in This is the core of the issue. A user will genuinely come to the platform for those features and then is locked in. The lock in will sometimes even cost the user more than the value of the free stuff over the duration of the collaboration by virtue of not being easy to leave. On the other hand the companies put in the freebies with the explicit intention of attracting a critical mass of users, and most of the times with the expectation that they will be removed once that target is reached. Then some creative "moral" accounting disregards that for those freebies the users also provided something of great value - they supported the platform in rising to wherever it rose. The platform may have extracted more value from the user than the user extracted from the platform. Each one of those free users probably brought a few more with them. So while to a point I understand the "you didn't pay so you didn't lose anything" mantra, I'm also completely aware that this was part of the long term strategy of the company and it's like hooking a fish and thinking "why's the fish complaining, it got the bait for free". A more honest and transparent strategy would be to set the expectations from the start, people can choose to take the freebie for a time knowing that at a predefined point they will cost. And the statement that "you don't like it build another one yourself" is very biased. From the ones being at the top of a mountain supported by users who have to pay to get out, to the ones who'd have to compete with the mountain when they can only start with a hill. It's what FB will tell you when you object to their questionable practices.
- Invictus0 4y ago
  > it's like hooking a fish and thinking "why's the fish complaining, it got the bait for free" A fish is unable to leave, your point is merely that it's "not easy" to leave. If you're on Gitlab then it seems pretty easy to just download your code and make an account somewhere else.
  - bussierem 4y ago
    A bit simplified on both parts -- a fish CAN leave too, and many do, by just ripping their mouth open to remove the hook by wriggling enough. For people on Gitlab, your point about "downloading the code and moving on" really only applies to the simplest point of use on Gitlab. Anybody using Gitlab's CI/CD pipelines has everything in their repo(s) fully setup only for that, and not for other CI/CD offerings. Moving their stuff is often much much much more work than "just download your code", and sometimes with time/money constraints, completely infeasible in the short term.
ensignavenger 4y ago
Gitlab in particular very much marketed their expansive free tier as an alternative to GitHub, and very much targeted Open Source projects migrating to them. This is why I only use Open Source, because if the SaaS company decides to change their pricing structure, I can always move to a different host or host it myself. Hence, I only ever used features on Gitlab that were in their Open Source core product. And why I am looking for an alternative that offers some of the features Gitlab has locked behind their proprietary offering.
ddevault 4y ago
> I think Sourcehut does this in an ideal way. On the site it very clearly says that it's currently free, but as soon as it goes stable it expects users to pay, in fact they actually sent me an email reminding me of that fact. There's no shiny "we have all these shiny features, the first dose is free!" behaviour. We still have some confused/entitled users despite this, who express astonishment that online services might require payment. We generally issue refunds to these users (and simultaneously terminate paid services). I think we need to make a cultural shift back towards paying for the things we use, so that incentives are properly aligned and there's no need to get "creative" with monetizing users.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  > I think we need to make a cultural shift back towards paying for the things we use, so that incentives are properly aligned and there's no need to get "creative" with monetizing users. That is if everyone acted in good faith. There are lots of services that monetize users even if they pay and will keep doing so as their primary business model is greed. You may start off paying a company that has good intentions but those good intentions rarely seem to last. It can be challenging to figure out what is good intention, like GitLab offering free services... Or maybe Uber Eats offering free credits as long as you install their mobile app and provide your personal information. I'd prefer to not give any money to someone unless I know for sure what I'm getting and that it is at a fair price.
omniglottal 4y ago
Pedantry may help address the author's gripe: whether a thing is provided at (monetary) cost or free, that provision, like any exchange of goods & services, is an entitlement. If a company entitles me to a service and it's free, I am justified in my being entitled to a free service. Any notion that I'm not entitled to that service for free would be invalid unless the company set appropriate expectations. However, the company, in fact, set expectations that the product is free. You are not entitled to the delusion that users should have any other expectation unless your aim is to promote user distrust and cynicism.
gaius_baltar 4y ago
> there is a certain kind of lock-in. But vendor lock-in is one of the perfect factors to considerate when monetizing these services, as are short notice periods, amount of work required for migration, and time pressure. I can imagine they have more impact on final price than things like value of service, SLAs and warranties. After analysis, Gitlab found that the current prices are the best balance between getting revenue and users migrating away. I compare this with Photobucket: it was a free image hosting site that allowed hotlinking and ended up used everywhere. One of the largest group of users was the small scale online merchants, they hosted lots (lots!) of product photos there and hotlinked them to Amazon, eBay, etc. Then overnight they changed the free users features, disabled hotlinking and replaced the images with a placeholder, unless users paid for a subscription costing USD 400,00. The hosting and bandwidth cost were not the important factors: there was a very long tail and most images were loaded just once in forever. There was a lot of less expensive sites doing the same, but the incentive for paying was the amount of hotlinked images that needed to be changed manually in a very short notice -- and the small merchants had no time nor resources to do this quickly enough, before the lost sales pile up or their ads get reported for not featuring the images. So I can suppose a lot of them just paid up. This strategy would not have worked if accounts were grandfathered. That's the reasoning for Gitlab (and Github, it's just a matter of time): how much effort would cost to migrate away and how the projects would be disrupted until it is finished? As git is distributed and users are technically versed and can automate migration of the centralized features, it's no wonder that it cost less the Photobucked. However, there must be factors pushing the price up: one that I can easily imagine is amount of Go projects that download dependencies from repos with URLs hardcoded in source. And all their cloned copies, packaged tarballs, etc.

dspillett 4y ago

> I think Sourcehut does this in an ideal way. On the site it very clearly says that it's currently free And the honesty about alpha quality is refreshing. I usually find that someone being honest about that indicates that their idea of “alpha quality” is some distance better than what many claim to be “beta” or “release” quality! And not tracking (assuming this doesn't change in future) means that once you do pay you aren't paying twice (once with money, once with letting yourself be stalked by commercial interests). Self-hosted option too. Duly added to my ever-growing list of things I'd like to investigate but might never find time for…

belorn 4y ago

The keyword here is infrastructure platforms. When those change, everything built on top has to change with it and this create work for people. I could imagine what happen if gmail would suddenly become a paid platform with no free tier. Users would have to change very single account they got in the world that is tied to that email, and I know in some cases you might need to contact support (through email) or use a recovery password. A lot of peoples identity is tied to a free service, a "freebie" given by a for-profit company. I fully agree that users have some outsized expectations on free infrastructure platforms, through I wouldn't blame that on the user. User's don't generally have much choice in what platform their bought products is built on top, but it is them that feel the effect first when the bottom layer is changed under their feet.

xialvjun 4y ago
You scared me. Oh, my God, what if Google announced free Gmail user will be deleted in one month tomorrow.

buran77 4y ago

> they do that knowing very well that there is a certain kind of lock-in This is the core of the issue. A user will genuinely come to the platform for those features and then is locked in. The lock in will sometimes even cost the user more than the value of the free stuff over the duration of the collaboration by virtue of not being easy to leave. On the other hand the companies put in the freebies with the explicit intention of attracting a critical mass of users, and most of the times with the expectation that they will be removed once that target is reached. Then some creative "moral" accounting disregards that for those freebies the users also provided something of great value - they supported the platform in rising to wherever it rose. The platform may have extracted more value from the user than the user extracted from the platform. Each one of those free users probably brought a few more with them. So while to a point I understand the "you didn't pay so you didn't lose anything" mantra, I'm also completely aware that this was part of the long term strategy of the company and it's like hooking a fish and thinking "why's the fish complaining, it got the bait for free". A more honest and transparent strategy would be to set the expectations from the start, people can choose to take the freebie for a time knowing that at a predefined point they will cost. And the statement that "you don't like it build another one yourself" is very biased. From the ones being at the top of a mountain supported by users who have to pay to get out, to the ones who'd have to compete with the mountain when they can only start with a hill. It's what FB will tell you when you object to their questionable practices.

Invictus0 4y ago
> it's like hooking a fish and thinking "why's the fish complaining, it got the bait for free" A fish is unable to leave, your point is merely that it's "not easy" to leave. If you're on Gitlab then it seems pretty easy to just download your code and make an account somewhere else.
- bussierem 4y ago
  A bit simplified on both parts -- a fish CAN leave too, and many do, by just ripping their mouth open to remove the hook by wriggling enough. For people on Gitlab, your point about "downloading the code and moving on" really only applies to the simplest point of use on Gitlab. Anybody using Gitlab's CI/CD pipelines has everything in their repo(s) fully setup only for that, and not for other CI/CD offerings. Moving their stuff is often much much much more work than "just download your code", and sometimes with time/money constraints, completely infeasible in the short term.

ensignavenger 4y ago

Gitlab in particular very much marketed their expansive free tier as an alternative to GitHub, and very much targeted Open Source projects migrating to them. This is why I only use Open Source, because if the SaaS company decides to change their pricing structure, I can always move to a different host or host it myself. Hence, I only ever used features on Gitlab that were in their Open Source core product. And why I am looking for an alternative that offers some of the features Gitlab has locked behind their proprietary offering.

ddevault 4y ago

> I think Sourcehut does this in an ideal way. On the site it very clearly says that it's currently free, but as soon as it goes stable it expects users to pay, in fact they actually sent me an email reminding me of that fact. There's no shiny "we have all these shiny features, the first dose is free!" behaviour. We still have some confused/entitled users despite this, who express astonishment that online services might require payment. We generally issue refunds to these users (and simultaneously terminate paid services). I think we need to make a cultural shift back towards paying for the things we use, so that incentives are properly aligned and there's no need to get "creative" with monetizing users.

encryptluks2 4y ago
> I think we need to make a cultural shift back towards paying for the things we use, so that incentives are properly aligned and there's no need to get "creative" with monetizing users. That is if everyone acted in good faith. There are lots of services that monetize users even if they pay and will keep doing so as their primary business model is greed. You may start off paying a company that has good intentions but those good intentions rarely seem to last. It can be challenging to figure out what is good intention, like GitLab offering free services... Or maybe Uber Eats offering free credits as long as you install their mobile app and provide your personal information. I'd prefer to not give any money to someone unless I know for sure what I'm getting and that it is at a fair price.

omniglottal 4y ago

Pedantry may help address the author's gripe: whether a thing is provided at (monetary) cost or free, that provision, like any exchange of goods & services, is an entitlement. If a company entitles me to a service and it's free, I am justified in my being entitled to a free service. Any notion that I'm not entitled to that service for free would be invalid unless the company set appropriate expectations. However, the company, in fact, set expectations that the product is free. You are not entitled to the delusion that users should have any other expectation unless your aim is to promote user distrust and cynicism.

gaius_baltar 4y ago

> there is a certain kind of lock-in. But vendor lock-in is one of the perfect factors to considerate when monetizing these services, as are short notice periods, amount of work required for migration, and time pressure. I can imagine they have more impact on final price than things like value of service, SLAs and warranties. After analysis, Gitlab found that the current prices are the best balance between getting revenue and users migrating away. I compare this with Photobucket: it was a free image hosting site that allowed hotlinking and ended up used everywhere. One of the largest group of users was the small scale online merchants, they hosted lots (lots!) of product photos there and hotlinked them to Amazon, eBay, etc. Then overnight they changed the free users features, disabled hotlinking and replaced the images with a placeholder, unless users paid for a subscription costing USD 400,00. The hosting and bandwidth cost were not the important factors: there was a very long tail and most images were loaded just once in forever. There was a lot of less expensive sites doing the same, but the incentive for paying was the amount of hotlinked images that needed to be changed manually in a very short notice -- and the small merchants had no time nor resources to do this quickly enough, before the lost sales pile up or their ads get reported for not featuring the images. So I can suppose a lot of them just paid up. This strategy would not have worked if accounts were grandfathered. That's the reasoning for Gitlab (and Github, it's just a matter of time): how much effort would cost to migrate away and how the projects would be disrupted until it is finished? As git is distributed and users are technically versed and can automate migration of the centralized features, it's no wonder that it cost less the Photobucked. However, there must be factors pushing the price up: one that I can easily imagine is amount of Go projects that download dependencies from repos with URLs hardcoded in source. And all their cloned copies, packaged tarballs, etc.