Nobody wants a customer who values a service like that at $2.

I agree.

But...

Reading the OPs post in the most favourable light, it sounds like what he'd like would be the existing "free" service, but to have a wait to pay for it in an attempt to ensure it'll still be worthwhile for the company to keep it running long term.

They say 'the cost for an "active but lightly used database" is somewhere between $1 and $2.5 per month.' so it's at least the right order of magnitude.

But one single support call to an entitled "paying customer" blows away any benefit here, so you're probably right that it's a bad idea.

But accept $2? Now you’re knowingly taking money from a cheapass, and you owe them some level of service, support, and commitment as they’re paying you.

Free customers are worth so much more than $2 customers.

Guess you would have to do yearly billing to not have it all eaten by processing fees.

Compare local bus tickets vs taking a cab. The taxi costs 50x more, but in the best case scenario, they provide exactly the same value! If the bus is late, cold or overcrowded, I have no expectations to get refunded or even an apology. I just have to suck it up. This happens rarely enough that I still accept it and hand over my trust to them.

There is no illusion that my $2 bus ticket alone is enough to keep the bus running, in contrast with the cab.

(Bus companies having a tough time to profit is an orthagonal issue, taxi drivers struggle a lot too)

Which is where a lot of the extra cost comes from.

Serving many very small customers like that is a thankless low-profit task. Some of your costs of doing business won't scale down perfectly beyond a certain point so you won't make nearly as much from 1000 2$ customers as you will 100 $20 ones. The same for numerous technical matters. And that is before you think about SLAs and support - you might have realistic views on what to expect for $2 but having worked at the cheap end of web hosting I can assure you that a great many will not, especially at times when things don't go 100% right.

the hope is that some customers will grow and bring more revenue from more expensive plans and services.

As the article explains, it won't even cover the base hardware costs. So you won't be "paying your part". The only reason to offer something like this is to "up-sell" to an actual properly paid plan, and since you will also lose quite a large percentage to payment processor fees, have extra support/admin overhead, deal with users who now feel entitles to "paid support", having a $1 or $2/month price point is just not worth it.

You will either need pay for it, or do it yourself on a cheap Linode VPS or Hetzner machine or whatnot.