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“Free” is never, ever free and it blows my mind that people still don’t get this.

Like, it’s understandable that you get a little burned the first time it happens, but then you’ve learned that this is how it all works. “Free” in a SAAS context has always and will always mean “no need to pay us until we decide otherwise, end of negotiation.”

Every time I look at a free account for some product now, I ask myself if I’m willing to pay for it at some point. If the answer is “no”, then sometimes I just don’t even do it.

People can’t even be bothered to think critically about the product situations they put themselves, and I’m sure these people are intelligent in many other aspects of their lives, but this is such a simple concept that I don’t understand how people, especially tech professionals, struggle with.

I’m from very far outside the tech bubble, far enough outside it that people don’t even personally know anybody that writes software and there are almost no local software companies. People in that group - the vast majority of people in the world but by definition not really possible for an engineer to have much contact with - do not understand what work is involved in creating and running software. How well do you know the amount of work involved in getting your medication into your body or your computer chip produced?

I think with software it’s even harder for some people to appreciate the costs because they don’t have an intuitive understanding of what’s required to make it - even though most people don’t know how a lot of their goods and services are made, they know eg a guy in a factory made it and some other guys transported it, and they can kind of put a face to a name. They might know that someone had to design the page they’re looking at, but they have no idea a backend even exists (why do you think we have the term “cloud”?) and no way to estimate what it costs to run, so of course they don’t also know about CVEs and web standards and wipeout/takeout/data residency and multitenancy and releases. They just see a web page that used to work and now doesn’t.

It doesn’t help that so much of the software they use is free, because it’s being used as a funnel/delivery mechanism for paid stuff like hardware or monetized through ads, or paid for by their employer, or because it’s just cheap to maintain. It’s kind of reasonable to assume that all that software stuff you use is free because it’s easy to make. Even though replit is software-for-software, it seems like the type of thing that’s used mostly by beginners who still probably don’t understand what it takes to maintain and operate paid software to a reasonable degree of quality, so the same situation applies.

Imo the worst part about this noreplit thing is that everyone who uses their product does, or at least should, know how difficult creating something like it is. These aren't the outside the tech bubble people, they're just confoundingly entitled.

We have faith that someone has hacked the business in a way to provide endless value.

That’s the impression I got looking at the dev behind this site. They clearly have development experience, they’re just mad and trying to make as much noise about it as they can.

I got the impression that they're very young and that can understandably come with a bit less self-awareness.

If that is the case, imo they'd be better served looking into the immense amount of resources available to students: I know when I was a kid I had $0 to spend on software and hardware, just sending an email from a .edu account got people willing to give

Today it's even easier to get those kinds of resources: https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate/

I remember an operations incident where we had to quickly pay a previously "free" service that had recently switched their model breaking the scale up of nodes in our system. Did the developer screw up by: 1) not creating a local system for hosting docker images (would detail the project timeline); 2) not well documenting this dependency for operations team before their departure? 3) his/her Manager did not catch this dependency on docker hosting docker images or otherwise catch their change in free tier policy ?

There is some liability on the host some free things your put out there for example "free cdn hosted" JavaScript libraries. If your not at a significant scale that has a business model that lets you commit to continuing to host things you should perhaps not set up free hosting for things.

Not saying it applies in Replit case; they are I imagine a company trying to show revenue growth so they can continue to exist and does not sound like they are breaking production with these changes that are announced ahead of time. Users can migrate to another thing as the article is outlining.

I think that relying on a free service in a production environment that could cause an outage is a really, really bad idea because you have no SLA or relationship with the vendor. In that sense, you are very much getting what you paid for.

It's not like paid services haven't done tons of rugpulls and unannounced changes over the last few years.

Oh I’m not saying that paid services are perfect by any means. But relying on a free service in prod is unquestionably more risky than using an established service in a paid context.

> ...why didn’t you pay for the thing you complain about? If something means something to you, adds value to your life, or saves you time, maybe it’s worth considering paying for it if the value provided is worth the cost. Demanding free stuff is entitled and silly and needs to stop.

At risk of derailing this conversation, but a common problem today is that oftentimes the companies offering a free service simply won't let you pay for it: long before Elon and Twitter Blue, I wanted to pay for Twitter so I could have an ad-free experience with some kind of "personal-grade" API access so I could use my own clients - but that was never an option.

Similarly, I would like to pay Google for an ad-free search experience (and to filter out content-farm websites from my search results...), instead Google's attitude is pushing me towards https://kagi.com/ - which is their loss, I suppose.

There's also the worst-of-both-worlds: when you pay for something, and it still comes with ads, and introduces user-hostile changes to the UX - or otherwise leaves you with the feeling that you aren't valued as a customer (e.g. Windows 11, Reddit, post-Elon Twitter, etc).

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We're told that as customers in a free-market it's up to us to vote with our wallets, but clearly even that isn't working to effect the change we want to see.

If supporting paid model costs more than what they make from paid users, why would a company implement it? Me, you, and most of engineers are in extreme minority for our willingness to pay for stuff to avoid ads. So you’ll get a very tiny percentage of people paying for a service where you hope you’ll recoup your investments after some years. Maybe never.

And yet many of these sites put enormous effort into combating ad blockers. So clearly the fact that users don’t want ads is fairly significant to them.

Users who don’t want ads aren’t exactly the same as users who are willing to pay. Prime example — myself. What I’m getting at, companies have calculated that in most of scenarios having paid model isn’t worth it. There will always be exceptions for services that people use a lot — Spotify, Netflix, Youtube and etc. For websites where you go on for a few minutes, people aren’t willing to pay up.

> If supporting paid model costs more than what they make from paid users, why would a company implement it?

But bnce the code is written to handle it then it's there for everyone to use (though yes, billing infrastructure does requires continual upkeep) - it could even be an internal garage/passion-project/hackathon thing. Companies like Twitter want to attact "the best", and people like that will want to build products that they themselves want to use - why stop them?

Plus there might be other intangible benefits to supporting power-users: it means the power-users will talk about how great something is, and you can't buy word-of-mouth influence like that.

> Me, you, and most of engineers are in extreme minority for our willingness to pay for stuff to avoid ads.

People said the same thing about paying-for-YouTube, and yet YouTube Premium is here to stay, and I'm glad that Google was willing to experiment with the concept, and it worked - but what about all the companies that aren't willing to at-least try to find out?

There is no such thing as “once the code has been written”.

A passion project is great until the passionate project flounder moves on, then it’s unmaintainable junk.

A passion-project that’s been productized just becomes a regular software project to anyone else besides the original creator - no-one is suggesting we take garage-projects and ship-it immediately.

It’s kinda like how Microsoft handled easter-eggs in the 1990s (before they were banned completely around ~2003), where the egg is just another engineering feature-project, with a spec-doc, a dev timeline, a test plan, and accountability - even if the end-feature is designed to be hidden.

You really can’t apply that to a payment feature. Unfortunately everything that touches money needs constant attention, even if you “just use Stripe”.

> There's also the worst-of-both-worlds: when you pay for something, and it still comes with ads, and introduces user-hostile changes to the UX - or otherwise leaves you with the feeling that you aren't valued as a customer (e.g. Windows 11, Reddit, post-Elon Twitter, etc).

And the Peacock streaming service.

The best part about that is that they lose money and customers and possibly gain zealous competitors because of it. Customer profit incentives far outweigh as revenue incentives

Yeah, I had been wanting a good paid search engine for ages since I didn’t like being google’s product or watching as their search got worse for my use cases over time. I pay for Kagi now and it’s really worth it for me, specially considering customizations you can add to improve the experience.

I did use GSuite for my own email/cloud storage setup though have since moved to other providers to try to mitigate risk, eg if Google doesn’t like me for literally any reason, they could disable my account and I’d lose access to mail, files, etc.

I’ll often pay for products I use a lot even though I don’t get that much value out, eg Discord/Reddit, though those two companies seem to recently have changed course somewhat so I’ve stopped paying for them. It was mostly to support a product I cared about.

A lot of people aren’t fortunate enough to be able to pay for stuff, which I was once not, and realize that it’s not always so simple of a problem.

In this case, though, if you have access to the Internet and a semi-okay device, you can achieve a lot

As someone who has done the technical work of converting a product with a free-tier to a paid product, I mostly agree. I think the problem mostly stems from the transition being inherently painful to a lot of users - it’s not really reasonable IMO for them to expect hosted software to be free forever but it’s definitely frustrating for them to transition off of it if they can’t or won’t pay for some reason.

In my particular case there were a few pain points where I couldn’t help but sympathize with the complainers. For starters, they’re still subject to all the problems stemming from vendor lock-in, so migrating away may require not just a lift and shift but a partial or total rewrite. Another common problem is that they wrote some software for eg a for-fun website or side project a long time ago and don’t check up on it often - they may not even use or have access to the email and other contact info you have at your disposal to tell them that their stuff will break if they don’t pay by a certain date. So a lot of people don’t know about the change until their stuff breaks or they check in one some old project and find it broken or gone.

This was less of a problem for me than it probably is for Replit, but students are particularly impacted because they usually have little money relative to their investment or interest in the thing. Students under 18 without any credit or debit card may not even have any way to pay at all. And also they are still figuring out how things work so they don’t necessarily understand without being told that eg free tiers are primarily meant make it easy for people to try the software before paying for it (the company doesn’t want you to use it forever without paying), subject to a lot of annoying things like abuse, and just generally require a decent amount of operational maintenance to keep running. And of course they haven’t had corporate communication styles beaten into their brains so they’re pretty rude about expressing their discontent.

Basically, I think it’s wrong to feel entitled to receiving a free thing that obviously costs someone money to provide for forever, and that you should just pay for it if it adds value and is reasonably priced. But it’s also inherently frustrating to be on the receiving end of these changes, so grumbling and discontent are only natural.

> but students are particularly impacted

That's a failure of the product/marketing planners then - there's a great deal of positive value that comes from offering free (or heavily discounted) plans for verified students, for example. There's a reason why Adobe and Autodesk tolerate, to a certain extent, unlicensed/piracy of their tools, especially in markets where even their educational-discounts are still too expensive for many to afford.

It's not just that it isn't free, it's that prices are much higher, previous (paid!) hobbyist plans are basically useless and their pricing sucks compared to alternatives, with no features to support the higher price.

So yes, they dislike it and want to let people know it sucks. Replit is welcome to charge what they want. Former users are welcome to post a public website of what they think of the changes.

The part that gets me is they have been reaching out to schools with their Teams for Education program and given the impression that it’s great for kids because it is free outside of the program.

I disagree they owe everyone the promises they have been sending out over the last 8 years if they fail to live upto that it affects what they represent to people. The brand is damaged. Having said that they have a base of customers and press (no press is bad press) so the strategy worked.

I remember them showing up on here. I knew this wasn't going to last.

Cloud Flare will be in a similiar spot in the future.