Do you have examples of companies in this space that actually reached break-even? Heroku never hit profitability as far as I remember and with the Salesforce acquisition the question of profitability is moot. AWS is a counter-example to using a free tier as a GTM strategy. AWS did not start with a free-tier offering for S3 or EC2, that only came years later. By then they already had significant traction in the market.