From an onboarding and testing perspective, it would be nice to be able to integrate other services ("Outbound networking"?) in the free tier. Maybe limit to one connection?
There's a bit of a nuance here. Even if you join the Blaze plan (pay as you go) there's still a large free quota. The quota is actually much larger than you get with Spark as well. We just can't allow arbitrary REST calls without a credit card. This helps avoid Cloud Functions being used for abuse/malware.