No, when they tout the product as free or cheap, and then only later up the pricing by 10x, once people have built their business around the older pricing model. That's a problem.
The pseudo-democratic silicon valley model of freemium is the problem. Seducing you into using something with the word 'free' but then trapping you with a changing API and cost structure. They should be up front with the realization that our ability to pay THEM is not commensurate with use by OUR users. Fees should based on OUR revenue, not usage.
So if someone builds a business that makes very little money but uses a ton of compute, the cloud provider should subsidize that? And conversely if you make a ton of money using barely any compute, you should pay your cloud provider a premium? This business model makes no sense.
The cloud provider would very much like to have the premium part of the model without the subsidy. Theres a reason a lot of b2b enterprise products dont list prices on their websites and ask that you contact sales instead. Value based pricing and all.
If you want to use a lot of resources without paying the cost of providing them, you are the definition of a bad customer. Your service provider isn’t your VC, not lest of all because you aren’t giving them equity. Bad customers should
always be fired ASAP so they don’t damage the business.
Ideally a business provides a service it’s customers are happy to pay the costs of, and not just the costs, but also a significant profit. That leads to a virtuous circle where the business is incentivized to continue to invest in the service, adding more servers, engineers and support personnel to add more valuable features for its customers.
Otherwise it’s just a matter of time before they post that farewell letter and give you the phase out date the servers are shutting down.
That's why I always look for an open-source alternative before using a free tier app. The free tiers are subsidized by paid ones so eventually users will have to pay up. Will be adding Supbase to https://opensource.builders.
I trust Google the same way I trust any company I deal with whether they are a SaaS company or my local butcher. I trust them to act in their own self-interest. Hopefully that will be inline with my own but if not be prepared.
No one's saying they shouldn't. If the current business model isn't sustainable, then it's a predatory lock-in scheme to monopolize the market and then take advantage of the people who've become dependant on your product.
Couldn't agree more. If major price changes are required to make the product work well after customers have been "enticed" in with a reasonable cost, it is underhanded to say the least.
It's more than just "entice". Google has crippled apps which don't use FCM since Oreo by limiting their ability to run alternatives which have a blocking socket waiting for new information. Only choice is to use FCM or lose essential functionality.
FCM is part of the core API now. They don't want other shitty solutions constantly waking the device up and eating your battery. That is why only FCM i.e. a trusted source is white listed. It's easy to peddle half truths hear just give it an anti Google color and carry your pitch forks.
Former Firebase and Parse employee. Back when Parse was coincidentally working on GCM (aka FCM) support to improve reliability over our own blocking-socket push network Google threatened to shut down our customers if they used our network. I personally liked our approach which used our network in China and Google elsewhere. I would believe Google were just concerned with Android quality, except our customers reported that they were being scraped from meetup lists, interviewed, and told that Facebook was pricing Parse low to steal data from our users.
We went quickly from "Why shouldn't they charge for a great product?" to "they deliberately toasted competing solutions by creating a white-list with only their own."
Admittedly, some other solutions were shitty and ate into the battery, but this wasn't the case for everything and forcing everyone onto a proprietary platform if they need an always connected background service is not "a great product," but a defective one.
I get your point that people expect differently from Google, but Google brought that upon themselves by marketing Android as an open source alternative to iOS. Now they've got the market share and developers, they're no longer interested in marketing it this way and are now apparently more interested in cementing the walled garden.
The battery issue is a valid concern, but I don't buy that this policy is purely to fix that problem. They took the opportunity to make sure people are passing all of their data through Google services in order to have full functionality on their devices.
I remember some software VC lady explaining this tactic among others for OSS businesses on the software engineering daily podcast. Her world seemed so inherently competitive, yet here she was, revealing her cards. Even though burning bridges to get ahead is typical behavior, it remains destructive. Calling it out helps us all move in a better direction.
The problem is they've forced people to use the product by hindering their ability to run background services without it. Since Oreo, background services are turned to idle unless they receive high priority push notifications from FCM.
