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Comment by jcampbell1 | Hacker News Reader

My interest in having my business rely on PHP Fog has just dropped to zero. This strikes me as a company going on tilt.

Interesting. I got the contrary impression: that from top to bottom this looks like a serious company that's going for a sustainable freemium business model, with no intention of flipping. I mean, this isn't a consumer-facing mobile-social-photo-check-in app. It's a platform for developers that has a pretty clear selection of tiered products that includes an introduction tier that's free, for development and testing on shared domain and servers. And they seem to have a pretty clear focus on their customer: developers.

Full disclosure: I am founder and CEO of PHP Fog

Joe hit it right on the nail here. We examined our costs very carefully and found some room to give back to our community.

The right blend that we were going for was give enough to do dev/test for free, and be reasonably priced (https://phpfog.com/pricing) when you are ready for production.

When Linode gives away more RAM or AWS makes inbound traffic free, it is not a sign these companies are less trustworthy, but that they love their users. We love developers and are trying to do right by them.

Just wanted to say thank you for doing this. It was a rather fortuitous coincidence because I'm starting on a Drupal project and was evaluating hosting options to use for development. I am exactly the demographic you mentioned: use for dev, with a strong consideration of upgrading for production.

So thank you.

I'll be switching from bluehost shortly and paying soon. Thanks!

Me, too. I'd much rather see a company with near-zero marginal costs spend money on a free tier than on sales people and marketing programs. It's so much more revealing to actually use a service than listen to a salesperson or trial a service for 30 days.

Yeah the blog post was very confusing to me. Now that I see this, it makes sense:

https://phpfog.com/pricing

Why didn't they link to it? It definitely sounded too good to be true.

Now that I found the pricing, my impression is: "OK they are trying to get more people on their platform so that once their sites get popular they will upgrade to paid plans." That seems more reasonable, but is not mentioned in the somewhat sleazy-sounding blog post.

What sounded sleazy about it? Seems like run of the mill freemium marketing copy to me.

Perhaps sleazy was too strong a word ... it just seemed "cheap". When someone offers you something for free, the first question is -- what's the catch?

I don't think their catch is bad at all -- it's standard platform marketing to offer a free trial. But at least link to your pricing. Say what the limitations are of the free version and what you get for paying. It should be easy but instead it left me wondering and it took several clicks to find what it was all about.

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