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Comment by LapsangGuzzler | Hacker News Reader

“Free” is never, ever free and it blows my mind that people still don’t get this.

Like, it’s understandable that you get a little burned the first time it happens, but then you’ve learned that this is how it all works. “Free” in a SAAS context has always and will always mean “no need to pay us until we decide otherwise, end of negotiation.”

Every time I look at a free account for some product now, I ask myself if I’m willing to pay for it at some point. If the answer is “no”, then sometimes I just don’t even do it.

People can’t even be bothered to think critically about the product situations they put themselves, and I’m sure these people are intelligent in many other aspects of their lives, but this is such a simple concept that I don’t understand how people, especially tech professionals, struggle with.

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I’m from very far outside the tech bubble, far enough outside it that people don’t even personally know anybody that writes software and there are almost no local software companies. People in that group - the vast majority of people in the world but by definition not really possible for an engineer to have much contact with - do not understand what work is involved in creating and running software. How well do you know the amount of work involved in getting your medication into your body or your computer chip produced?

I think with software it’s even harder for some people to appreciate the costs because they don’t have an intuitive understanding of what’s required to make it - even though most people don’t know how a lot of their goods and services are made, they know eg a guy in a factory made it and some other guys transported it, and they can kind of put a face to a name. They might know that someone had to design the page they’re looking at, but they have no idea a backend even exists (why do you think we have the term “cloud”?) and no way to estimate what it costs to run, so of course they don’t also know about CVEs and web standards and wipeout/takeout/data residency and multitenancy and releases. They just see a web page that used to work and now doesn’t.

It doesn’t help that so much of the software they use is free, because it’s being used as a funnel/delivery mechanism for paid stuff like hardware or monetized through ads, or paid for by their employer, or because it’s just cheap to maintain. It’s kind of reasonable to assume that all that software stuff you use is free because it’s easy to make. Even though replit is software-for-software, it seems like the type of thing that’s used mostly by beginners who still probably don’t understand what it takes to maintain and operate paid software to a reasonable degree of quality, so the same situation applies.

Imo the worst part about this noreplit thing is that everyone who uses their product does, or at least should, know how difficult creating something like it is. These aren't the outside the tech bubble people, they're just confoundingly entitled.

We have faith that someone has hacked the business in a way to provide endless value.

That’s the impression I got looking at the dev behind this site. They clearly have development experience, they’re just mad and trying to make as much noise about it as they can.

I got the impression that they're very young and that can understandably come with a bit less self-awareness.

If that is the case, imo they'd be better served looking into the immense amount of resources available to students: I know when I was a kid I had $0 to spend on software and hardware, just sending an email from a .edu account got people willing to give

Today it's even easier to get those kinds of resources: https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate/

I remember an operations incident where we had to quickly pay a previously "free" service that had recently switched their model breaking the scale up of nodes in our system. Did the developer screw up by: 1) not creating a local system for hosting docker images (would detail the project timeline); 2) not well documenting this dependency for operations team before their departure? 3) his/her Manager did not catch this dependency on docker hosting docker images or otherwise catch their change in free tier policy ?

There is some liability on the host some free things your put out there for example "free cdn hosted" JavaScript libraries. If your not at a significant scale that has a business model that lets you commit to continuing to host things you should perhaps not set up free hosting for things.

Not saying it applies in Replit case; they are I imagine a company trying to show revenue growth so they can continue to exist and does not sound like they are breaking production with these changes that are announced ahead of time. Users can migrate to another thing as the article is outlining.

I think that relying on a free service in a production environment that could cause an outage is a really, really bad idea because you have no SLA or relationship with the vendor. In that sense, you are very much getting what you paid for.

It's not like paid services haven't done tons of rugpulls and unannounced changes over the last few years.

Oh I’m not saying that paid services are perfect by any means. But relying on a free service in prod is unquestionably more risky than using an established service in a paid context.

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