They should have called it "Free" instead of "Free forever".
When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
41–50 of 267 posts
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#42I wonder if they ever compared the price of AWS hosting and just renting a rack at a colocation facility. One way of thinking about this is that "free" isn't "enterprise" and while you would love to have them convert, hosting free users on a rack with a 500MB Cogent IP transport contract can be had for < $2K/month. So $24K a year. Is it a "teir-1" data center? no. Does it have failure redundancy? no. Is there a risk…
If your free plan is unreliable good luck converting users to paid though.
Ah but the rub is that it would not be unreliable.
One of the things I discovered was that "reliable" in the eyes of non-engineers isn't the same thing. I have a NAS system for my important data because I know it is reliable, I know dozens of people who "have a copy on a flash stick" because they consider that reliable.
You can build "good enough" in a rack that will serve a LOT of clients. One layer of ZFS (1U + 3U) for storage, Five 1U servers, one 2U 10G switch.
In my experience that is 1 failure (that results in an outage) every 2 years at most. When I was at Google I (like everyone) had access to failure information about equipment in the "fleet." Motherboards do fail, but VERY rarely, disks are the worst offender but with double parity ZFS you have a week at a minimum to replace a failed drive. ALL the drive failures at Blekko announced themselves before they failed with SMART data.
So in addition to the colo cost you've got an engineer spending part of their time watching the rack, fractional head count cost.
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#43Maybe it works to have a free tier and yank the rug out from everyone, and maybe the solution is that we should just pay for what things cost?
The whole internet is like this, people often don't want to pay, they want it free, then the advertisers pay, we get pissy about advertising, and we become the product, and we flock to the next free thing after the free thing stops being free ...
I wish things weren't all free, I wish we paid easily, and the relationship really be between us and the provider, directly with enough money to actually make them profitable. But it isn't that way for a lot of things, and I feel like we as users are part of the problem too.
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure I totally agree. Capitalizing on a competitors mistake is kind of slimy; calling out their poor business practices is not. Users will invest their time and resources into using your product based on the promise that it’s free forever. Changing your mind later puts the burden on them to figure out how to move forward. Even if I was a free user and I was considering a paid plan that type of dishonesty would ma…
Yeah, not sure about this either. What it does do is to make me think about the free tier for apps I use, and then wondering what I will do if that free tier becomes more expensive than the value I get out of it. This reminds me of the love/hate relationship I have with the Fusion 360 free tier, and maybe even some paid tiers where lifetime is not really lifetime.
You set off the cost of moving elsewhere, like an insurance. Or you are smart and use commodity services.
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#45Maybe it works to have a free tier and yank the rug out from everyone, and maybe the solution is that we should just pay for what things cost? The whole internet is like this, people often don't want to pay, they want it free, then the advertisers pay, we get pissy about advertising, and we become the product, and we flock to the next free thing after the free thing stops being free ... I wish things weren't all free…
I agree with you, I'd rather pay for stuff. But paid products required appropriate information about what you're buying. A freemium model is one way that potential buyers can decide if a thing is valuable enough to pay for.
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#46Maybe it works to have a free tier and yank the rug out from everyone, and maybe the solution is that we should just pay for what things cost? The whole internet is like this, people often don't want to pay, they want it free, then the advertisers pay, we get pissy about advertising, and we become the product, and we flock to the next free thing after the free thing stops being free ... I wish things weren't all free…
I agree with you, I'd rather pay for stuff. But paid products required appropriate information about what you're buying. A freemium model is one way that potential buyers can decide if a thing is valuable enough to pay for.
Free for 60 days?
I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but a more direct relationship I would hope would establish a better pattern for everyone.
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#47If I were a legislator, I would introduce a bill to ban footnotes in advertising. Everything that the company feels it needs to print, must be included in the main ad copy. Enough with this coy duplicity.
Where I live there are several large billboards advertising incredible offers. The fine print is so small I'm not sure it's even possible to read.
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#48I am not sure why anyone is surprised or this should even be news. I don’t have a speck of business education and I can see this is no way sustainable. “Free forever” is not a sound business strategy (shock emoji). If it is free, like Youtube, Reddit, Zulip, than expects them to profit in some other way. If you can’t explain how a business profit you shouldn’t use it because: 1. Its not going to last. 2. They are doi…
> no way sustainable
> If you can’t explain how a business profit
They profit off the other tiers. This isn't a free product, it's a free tier.
Whether that's sustainable depends on how much it costs to run. But it can definitely be a sustainable marketing expense.
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is. The goal of the "free forever" is to (1) exposure / publicity (2) lock-in (3) ecosystem / API integrations (4) eyeballs (5) customer counts for investor decks (6) etc. Consideration doesn't have to be financial.
Really? Is there case law to this effect? These things happen, and have value, but I wouldn't have considered them as "given as a quid pro quo" or "mutual promises".
This is a case in which the plaintiff claimed that the other party in a very large housing development contract went back on the implied promise of seeking planning permission, and it was ruled in the plaintiff's favour due to this:
> Thus, it seems to me that the content of the obligation of utmost good faith in the SPA was to adhere to the spirit of the contract, which was to seek to obtain planning consent for the maximum Developable Area in the shortest possible time, and to observe reasonable commercial standards of fair dealing, and to be faithful to the agreed common purpose, and to act consistently with the justified expectations of the parties. I do not need, it seems to me, to decide whether this obligation could only be broken if QD or CPC acted in bad faith, but it might be hard to understand, as Lord Scott said in Manifest Shipping how, without bad faith, there can be a breach of a "duty of good faith, utmost or otherwise".
https://www.casemine.com/judgement/uk/5a8ff77660d03e7f57eac9...
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure I totally agree. Capitalizing on a competitors mistake is kind of slimy; calling out their poor business practices is not. Users will invest their time and resources into using your product based on the promise that it’s free forever. Changing your mind later puts the burden on them to figure out how to move forward. Even if I was a free user and I was considering a paid plan that type of dishonesty would ma…
> Not sure I totally agree. Capitalizing on a competitors mistake is kind of slimy; calling out their poor business practices is not. Which part of what I wrote didn't you agree with?
obviously I'm not GP because, what is wrong with capitalizing on a competitor's mistake? Isn't that the point of competition?