Pardon my language, but fuck free. I don't want to rely on anything that's free. It's a perversion of market principles. I don't take any startup offering seriously that starts with free. Charge money and make the value proposition clear. Yes that means you can't compete with Amazon or the big boys on price. Differentiate with better service or find a better idea.

Free is for entertainment.

BitPay is an even more brazen example, using the "unlimited" and "forever" combo together in the same sentence.

September 2015: https://web.archive.org/web/20150709093806/https://bitpay.co...

    A free plan with unlimited processing, forever

February 2016: https://bitpay.com/pricing

    FREE: 30 Transactions / Month, Up to $1,000 Daily

And it's not even $240/year, you need a paid MailChimp plan as well, so the total costs is at least $360/year.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11170713

"free forever" -> $360/year in a matter of days. Not sure what they were thinking how this reflects on their brand.

If you stop paying (e.g. if they increase prices on you), you lose the ability to publish new content. This is different than "free forever." Their "promise" is that existing content will, to the best of their ability, never disappear from the web.

Which is why I'm moving to SendGrid.