3 ms·
If cheap credit is at an end I can see a lot of small companies and hobbyists losing free-tier services. I don't know how companies like Gitlab can give away so
by raffraffraff 4y ago
If cheap credit is at an end I can see a lot of small companies and hobbyists losing free-tier services. I don't know how companies like Gitlab can give away so much functionality for zero money. One startup I worked at operated for years on free tiers and spent nothing on version control, CICD, CDN, remote access, authentication, email, chat, video conferencing etc.
I don't want that dream to end, of course. I make use of free-forever services. I just don't see it lasting if we get to the end of cheap credit.
- semi-extrinsic 4y agoWell, for all of those things, what is expensive for a small company if you run it yourself is the sysadmin aspect. You could run all these services off of a pair of three-year-old servers from ebay for next to nothing in hardware cost, even if you buy cold spares for disks and fans and power supplies from the get-go. But the cost of having someone learn to install, configure and operate all this software is very significant. But when you're at the large scale and offering this as a commercial service, you've designed your free tier such that the marginal cost of adding a free tier customer is essentially zero, and the best way to acquire new customers is to have someone in that org using your product's free tier for their personal projects.