Re:The economics of a Postgres free tier
by hipadev23 on Thursday July 11, 2024 @09:43PM
(#40942135)
The thing is free are just customers you haven’t upsold yet. You can always boot them off your platform eventually, and they cant really complain, cause it’s free tier and it never lasts, and most everyone recognizes that.
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.
Some sort of service targeting hobby projects could possibly work if the support is a community forum.
Guess you would have to do yearly billing to not have it all eaten by processing fees.
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.