Whilst I appreciate the comparison, it makes no sense for there to be a difference in the level of alerting, stability, security, safety, etc of a free/paid tier and a full production tier.

You can bet your bottom dollar I trial things on lower tiers, and much later on I may very well take the things I learned into production. My production budget isn't as big as some, but its still a tidy 6 figure sum each year just for cloud hosted services, with no licences or wages in that figure. If my trial on your platform goes tips up without notice, I'm going to likely conclude you're not a particularly safe place for my production stack for whatever it is I'm working on. You should also count on me telling my contemporaries about my experience too.