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To play devil's advocate, many successful developer focused companies have gone down this route successfully. Neon, Cloudflare, Firebase, Github and many more have all made free tiers work.

I suspect there's a special dynamic for developers. I'm usually more willing to try out new things on personal projects, but I also don't like paying for things on personal projects. At work I don't care how much things cost, but I'll definitely advocate for tools that worked well on personal projects.

Supabase doesn't even require a credit card, but your data goes poof in 60 days if you don't pay.

Ideally you want your tools to be so easy to use, clients just switch onto a paid plan when they want to get serious.

Many successful companies that we’ve all heard of have free tiers. They offer free tiers because it works. They’re certainly not in the ad business.

Many people win in a casino. Forget the majority who do not. Competing on price, unless you are Toyota or Google, is a low probability move.