Re:Show HN: 8base – Ready-to-Rock GraphQL API and Serverless...
by andric on Wednesday September 04, 2019 @10:27PM
(#20883355)
Being sustainable is important, but not at the expense of people’s ability to tinker/learn.
At the very least, offer a highly-limited and almost-crippled free tier, like Heroku or Glide does. Maybe you can only register a few users. Maybe the # of function calls are limited to a few a day. Or maybe dormant apps go to sleep.
Another way to put it is that Hasura is mostly about enabling GraphQL on Postgres; 8base is the backend for powerful, enterprise-grade (when necessary) software. GraphQL is an essential design detail for us but not the business or product itself.
Regarding your comment about freemium; I've seen many backend products falter, pivot, and shut down from having unsustainable business models. We are offering a robust plan for $8 / month to start. If developers agree with us that their DX is better, then $8 shouldn't be an issue as their time is more costly. But we appreciate what you are saying and are watching this closely.