Sure. If they want the free tier to be a taste, then build it that way (see `sr.ht` for a service I believe to be doing this well though I don't use it personal

Sure. If they want the free tier to be a taste, then build it that way (see `sr.ht` for a service I believe to be doing this well though I don't use it personally). If it is sold as a loss-leader to capture "growth", that just sounds like bad business planning to me. FWIW, I pay for the services I highly value (news sites, media, email, etc.), but other times there's just a gap of "free and mostly suitable" to "expensive and overkill" that's too hard to justify knowing that my contributions aren't going to prevent the first bucket from overloading the boat at some point and leaving "everyone" out to sea in the process. I'd much rather see "sorry, we can't maintain the status quo into the future; we'll grandfather the early believers in at their current level (or some X% over their current usage up to whatever cap existed) and the free tier now has Y% fewer features so that we can continue to maintain what we do into the future" instead of "we sold out to Meta" leaving even paying customers holding the sadness that entails.