[mdale]

I remember an operations incident where we had to quickly pay a previously "free" service that had recently switched their model breaking the scale up of nodes in our system. Did the developer screw up by: 1) not creating a local system for hosting docker images (would detail the project timeline); 2) not well documenting this dependency for operations team before their departure? 3) his/her Manager did not catch this dependency on docker hosting docker images or otherwise catch their change in free tier policy ?

There is some liability on the host some free things your put out there for example "free cdn hosted" JavaScript libraries. If your not at a significant scale that has a business model that lets you commit to continuing to host things you should perhaps not set up free hosting for things.

Not saying it applies in Replit case; they are I imagine a company trying to show revenue growth so they can continue to exist and does not sound like they are breaking production with these changes that are announced ahead of time. Users can migrate to another thing as the article is outlining.

[LapsangGuzzler]

I think that relying on a free service in a production environment that could cause an outage is a really, really bad idea because you have no SLA or relationship with the vendor. In that sense, you are very much getting what you paid for.

[Shekelphile]

It's not like paid services haven't done tons of rugpulls and unannounced changes over the last few years.

[LapsangGuzzler]

Oh I’m not saying that paid services are perfect by any means. But relying on a free service in prod is unquestionably more risky than using an established service in a paid context.