[samlambert]

Were we supposed to just keep it up until we go out of business or something? Out of sheer duty. Like burn everything we built to the ground to keep the free tier going as long as possible? Endlessly indentured to provide a free service on the internet for people that will never pay us money so that the people that do pay us money can eventually have to move provider too because we are shutting down?

I didn't enjoy doing it. I felt bad but I don't regret it at all.

[Imustaskforhelp]

Fair take I guess, but my curiosity wants me to ask how big were the costs of the free tier that it was trying to make you shut down..

Do you feel as if people were abusing the free tier ? Was the only solution according to PlanetScale be to close the free tier entirely? How much were the people actually using the service (like out of 100 people who signed up, how many people were constantly utilizing it till its fullest) or ( maybe abusing it even)

If lets say that you could build your company once again or you could start planetscale from its beginnings, would you still take this decision before it was big, since I feel like as if the free tier was a key part in atleast giving PlanetScale some name/fame.

I can understand how you feel but I just feel like there were a lot of people who were advocates of your software, partially because of how people could test it out for free as well and those advocates were the one who were hurt the most. Personally, I wasn't involved but I would pretty bummed too if I advocate a service and it does something like this, although, I would still understand the situation.

[cess11]

Yes, that was the promise you made. You said 'besides our commercial offering we're going to support your personal projects you run out of passion, forever' and then you changed it to 'actually, we're going to delete your passion projects unless you pay us money'.

You should absolutely regret making that promise. As I understand it you're wrapping hardware at AWS and GCP, and likely have since the beginning, so you should absolutely have understood that this was a bad promise because it was dependent on recurring costs towards those suppliers that you did not have control over.

[encoderer]

“you should absolutely have understood that this was a bad promise”

Absolutely wild to me that you talk to peers like children.

Nobody owes you anything. It’s all best effort.

[DetroitThrow]

>I felt bad but I don't regret it at all.

Sure, it sounds like a marketing mistake, and you're owning up to it not being sustainable.

But you're burning trust with people before they even have a relationship with your company if you pretend it never happened.

It's much better to say "Sorry non-customers, this wasn't sustainable. I hope this new approach will better serve us both in the hobby use case and still be sustainable!"

[samlambert]

i have said almost exactly this so many times since it happened

[puches]

Its hard shutting down services and nobody wants to do it. I've been there as a CTO and co-founder, but you made the right decision. Glad to see the new $5 plan because, imo, Planetscale is the best database to build with for majority of applications.

[samlambert]

thank you

[zenlot]

Just apologize for misleading those who depended on your "free" promises. That's it, simple as that.