[mxstbr]

This is similar to the problem we face, where you're charging based on usage of something people don't usually count. For us, that's GraphQL requests.

While certainly big companies have monitoring for this kind of thing set up, we learned that a majority of engineering teams have absolutely no clue how many GraphQL requests they get per month. Like, not even a ballpark. Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Billions? No clue, could be any of those.

Our free plan was originally 5M free requests per month, which is relatively generous — but people didn't know and thus we had almost no users on the free plan. We recently changed it to just be "free for solo developers working on side projects / indie hacking / etc. no matter how many requests".[0]

So far, the change's been well received! Curious to see Planetscale dealing with the same general kind of issue, just on a different layer.

[0]: https://graphcdn.io/blog/unlimited-free-requests-for-develop...

[Aeolun]

It’s because it makes zero sense for me to care about how many requests I send when I have my own server.

The limit is basically 31 x 24 x 3600 x [req per second server can handle]

Even at a relatively low rate of 10rps that is 26M requests per month.

Now putting a demo environment at 2 rps per second for a whole month is pretty generous, but until I took the time to calculate it, it sounded like a pretty bad value proposition to me (even though I probably make less than 1000 requests per day).