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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

One thing about the EU based platforms is that they tend to have much more limited free tier, often there's none.

IMHO the deep pockets of the US based tech is their primary competitive advantage. In other countries they seem to try to make a bit of money every month but in USA they tend to aim to make a lot of money at once down the road. I'm under the impression that when non-US services end up failing, US based ones end up enshitified.

So the EU based stuff stays about the same for many years, the US based stuff starts as we are saving the world, democratizing the technology and doing all this for free(*) and then your bill jumps 100x or your experience goes 100x down.

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But e.g. Hetzner, OVH and Ionos are so cheap, you can easily keep a project alive for years until it gets traction or break even. Paying like 50€ a month is peanuts.

On AWS or Google Cloud or Firebase you pay $0 a month until you start paying thousands of dollars per month. This makes the brands ubiquitous and developers knowledgeable of the platform. It's like having free MS Office subscription for free when in school, so everyone who graduates ends up knowing the MS tools and it's not feasible to switch to competitor.

Shouldn't this be illegal?

Price dumping in international trade is already illegal, like when China floods the market with electric cars and solar panels.

And I only wonder why EU has put up so long with price dumping in other domains. Like the whole Microsoft world domination strategy that was made possible by intentionally lousy enforcement of its IP.

I guess nobody considers it price dumping because it's given away entirely for free. People only see it as price dumping when somebody offers something at a far lower price.. but nobody feels like complaining when somebody is so rich that they throw their money at you for free.

I don't know how this can be illegal, although I agree that the practice is pretty harmful in some ways.

In the AI age for example, almost all platforms are giving it away for free now and costs huge amount of money for them.

They are able to give it for free because their investors expect down the road to make much more money like they did in the Web age and then Apps age. Thanks to the investors of the time we had great run on the web and later in the apps.

In one hand it means that sometime in the future if they corner the market and establish a monopoly the service will suffer, will be used for doing bad things or become very expensive, just what the web and apps has become.

In the other hand this accelerates the technological advancements and deployment far beyond what would be possible in another business model.

> And I only wonder why EU has put up so long with price dumping in other domains. Like the whole Microsoft world domination strategy that was made possible by intentionally lousy enforcement of its IP.

Because eing a US vassal makes it difficult to sanction your overlord.

You can use cloud while you have free credits – just spend them on a beefy AWS Lightsail server or something like that. Then pack it up and move to a cheaper provider.

If you look closer, you can see that the free tier is mostly covering SaaS in order to lock you into their APIs. The free tier for VMs isn't that generous.

For a startup, locking into an API that is initially free can often break their neck in the long run. Because for a startup, switching providers is a big distraction. It's often better to run VMs or colocated servers on an OSS stack.

I'd argue that OVH (European) is the cost leader for that in every market they are in.

I agree but the $0(*) people do win, they usually loose money for years and years and they are able to provide great service.

Eventually they lock you down and start recouping their investments from you but they do make some things possible simply because it costs nothing to try and as a result a lot of great things are incepted on those platforms.

Merrymake has a pretty nice free tier, with very few limitations, and it's definitely technologically advanced. And it being serverless, you'll only pay for as much as your code runs, if you wanna go paid tier.

Full disclosure, I work there.

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