[horsawlarway]

> If you are small enough that you can run on a free tier, you are too small for me to have confidence that you are sticking around.

There's a lot of truth in this. Particularly since the free tiers on most cloud providers are explicitly designed to suck you in, then raise the rates tremendously as you scale.

A business that might be fine with 100 customers on the cloud could struggle mightily to cover the costs of dealing with 1000 customers on the same stack. The linear revenue growth doesn't match up to the insane cost increase as you go from "hobby project" to "small business" in the cloud.

[vbezhenar]

Can you provide examples where linear growth in resource consumption does not reflect on linear growth in clouds? So far all free tiers that I saw were trivial in cost savings and anything after free tier was pretty linear (or even big scales allowed to save something).

[horsawlarway]

> Can you provide examples where linear growth in resource consumption does not reflect on linear growth in clouds?

Sure - you were hosting your DB just fine with 100 customers using standard SSD, but now at 1000 you're blowing your IOPS budget and need to upgrade to premium SSD. The premium SSD costs twice what the standard SSD does for the same space - your usage will not have doubled.

Or - god help you, you were hosting your db just fine with 100 customers using a small VM, and to avoid having to think about it, you've decided to move from a self-managed db on a VM to something like Cosmos DB. No growth in usage at all from you, but your costs are about to shoot way up.

Or - I've added a customer in a region that has poor connectivity to my current region of choice - oops, setting up edge services closer to them is going to hurt. Now I'm sending data between regions, incurring all sorts of costs between services that I wasn't with a single region setup.

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My experience with the cloud (and I've been a heavy user of both Azure and AWS, not as much GCP) is this: There are bands of costs, within that band, costs will tend to grow linearly as you grow.

The problem, is that you will outgrow the band you're in. There is a hard limit on something that you weren't thinking about (IOPS, for example) and once you hit that you have to jump to a different band with a new cost structure.

Usually, that means increasing base spend by a large amount compared to usage, and then getting slightly better cost/use at the new higher base.

[swebdev]

Sure, check AWS Cloudfront pricing.