4 ms·
Saying we should expect companies to destroy the free tier is a bit of an insult. The internet was full of free things and companies have been shoving them in o
by marricks 4y ago
Saying we should expect companies to destroy the free tier is a bit of an insult. The internet was full of free things and companies have been shoving them in our faces for decades.
- "Free gigabytes of mail storage!"
- "Free communication with your teams"
- "Free internet hosting for hobby projects!"
The free tech offerings are just good enough to kill open source or entrenched alternatives. The goal is to suffocate them. Once the competition is gone or investors demand more money destroy the tier/raise prices.
FB is trying to do that to Craigslist with marketplaces, Uber and Lyft and doing that with Taxis, AirBnb with... etc etc etc
- wolpoli 4y agoDon't forget how "free unlimited photo storage" ended too after competitors shifted their business model.
- numpad0 4y agoYes, and I believe the model is as follows: - infra costs sustainably decreases, exponentially; - user signups almost-sustainably increases, exponentially; - OpEx may increase, linearly; - therefore, profit and scale almost-sustainably continues explosion to a rather enormous scale, landing founders with astronomical wealth. - and this, by the way, is why charging users for actual costs is pointless. Harmful even! We’re offering values, not collecting fees. We’re going for the moon! Forget about gases for cars, we can pay out of the pocket. That’s irrelevant. This actually worked for decades, hence the free tier. And the first two bullet points stopped working last midnight. And now Houston is working on a solution.