Linear usage cost makes sense, but the more common/sane thing is cheaper unit pricing as you hit scale.
Depends on the provider's business model.
Many devtools want to make it trivial to get started, and zero/low prices facilitate that. They know that once you are set up with the tool, the barrier to moving is high. They also know that devs are tinkerers who may take a free product discovered on their free time and introduce it to a workplace who will pay for it.
But someone has to pay for all those free users/plans (they aren't using zero resources). With this business model, the payer is the person/org with some level of success who is forced up into a more expensive plan.
This is a valid strategy for two reasons:
- such users/orgs are less likely to move because they already have working code using the system and moving introduces risk
- if they have high levels of traffic, they may (not certainly, but may) be a profit making enterprise and will do the cold hard calculus of "it costs me $50/100 GB but would take a dev N hours to move and will have X opportunity cost" and decide to keep paying
The successful "labor of love" project is an unfortunate casualty.
The counter to that argument is that it's creating an adverse effect on your most profitable customers, with an incentive to move to offerings that don't have free tiers (or where the free tiers are not considerably affecting your own costs).
If your free tier is so lucrative that you need to 25x the cost, then your free tier is too expansive and you need to tone it down until the economics make sense.
This sucks major donkey dick and I can't think of a single dev who would actually want this.
