We're very active about providing as much free support as possible to users over email, github, and IRC. We've collected some great quotes from users about how impressed they are with our responsiveness.

Unfortunately we're a small team and frequently travel to events, etc. So it's expensive for us to guarantee that someone will be around. Obviously we'd like to provide support to as many people as possible at the lowest possible rate, so as we have more people paying for support and economies of scale kick in we hope to be able to drop those prices. In the meantime we need to cover our costs or development will stall

edit: our current prices are also based on the level of support that our most active beta users needed. Now that we're past 1.0 hopefully users will need less help which will also help lower prices. We have a very high bar for support quality and don't want to overextend ourselves to the point where we can't deliver

I use Cloud 66, so I'll use that as a comparison in terms of price. Their price is $19/mo for the first server + $9/mo for additional servers. It's a little bit of work to get set up and running.

To compare with Flynn, their current pricing is $74-75/node, which is quite a bit more. However, Flynn appears to offer more 1 on 1 support whereas Cloud66's is extra.

Nonetheless, there's quite a bit of difference. I think the range of $20/node may be reasonable. Anything less, the company would be unable to grow. In fact, especially for early stage startups, I'd probably err on the side of a higher pricing (eg. $30-40).

The paid plan is not for the side project but for funded projects or ones that already have money coming in.

Flynn is also a whole lot easier to get set up. Again, just what I've observed based on an earlier release.