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by andric 2481 days ago
Second this.

A timed trial just feels weird. I like that Heroku, Netlify, Contentful, and Firebase have a free tier, so I can use it for small demos and to learn the platform. If I have to pay for every single tutorial or playground project I won‘t want to use the platform or even want to learn it.

It also kind of disincentivizes teachers on online platforms (like Udemy) to teach it. Because you often need to go through a few examples in order to learn something. i.e. if I do a node.js course, the course author isn’t just going to make me build 1 practice app, I’m probably gonna build a few and then host them on Heroku free dyno, the same way if I take a React course, I’m gonna build a few practice apps and host them on Netlify.

1 comments

Andric, this is great feedback and we appreciate it. As you probably know, pricing is a bit of an experiment as a company evolves so we are listening 100%.
Yeah that's basically my point when there's a new shiny framework or even a headless cms or something, we (devs) like to test it out a bit, and we might come back to it 5-10 times before actually pulling the trigger and using the service.

Even all the major cloud platforms have free tiers for this reason - to get devs hooked on their platform so there is no other option they'd rather use.

Not saying the free tier should be outrageous... maybe 100MB and 10k requests per month or something small like that.

Gremlinsinc, please email me at albert@8base.com as I'd like to chat with you about this some more if you are up for it. Thank you.
Thank you for the quick response! You guys are building something really cool, I have no doubt that once you figure out pricing it has the potential to go viral.

I’m a product/frontend guy who’s trying to build a side project, and backend stuff has always been a PITA for me to figure out.

Right now I’m torn between investing time to learn AWS Amplify, or investing time to learn 8base.

8base has already captured my imagination, and I can’t wait to go further with learning it. Unfortunately I feel uncomfortable creating a few projects to practice and then later being shut out of them or be forced to pay $8/mth.

Andric, please email me at albert@8base.com as I'd like to chat with you about this some more. Thank you.