Well, what's the value in the free, small web apps? Ultimately some money, and maybe even a small company's worth of money, but not enough to affect the bottom

Well, what's the value in the free, small web apps? Ultimately some money, and maybe even a small company's worth of money, but not enough to affect the bottom line of a company the size of what dotCloud is aiming for. Being able to get little apps up and running quickly for free (just like on Heroku) is a great marketing tool, and a feeder for bigger accounts. Any app that's serious will quickly outpace the sandbox (horizontal/vertical scaling, failover, loadbalancing, etc.) And there's little point in trying to extract value from apps that aren't generating enough value themselves. Seems like a very smart move to me.