The pricing model is very well thought out and worth studying. Cheap but not free generous base layer, that falls back to prepaid credit resource based billing for high users. Even details like punitively increased pricing to discourage higher risk outbound email patterns.
This removes risks from both seller and buyer. The seller is not afraid of an avalanche of free trial users resulting in a big cloud bill. The user is not afraid of surprise overages (cough recent Vercel scandals cough) nor has to think about usage patterns that fit into arbitrary quotas, nor about surprises that catch up to you if you use the service at scale.
This is the way to do small utilities that have a cloud cost; services of the 'save you the trouble of self-hosting' type, or the 'tool somebody writes once, and people might use occasionally for years' pattern.
Maybe not the way to extract maximum value and growth for an ambitious startus, but a good choice for the many modest niche services out there.
This removes risks from both seller and buyer. The seller is not afraid of an avalanche of free trial users resulting in a big cloud bill. The user is not afraid of surprise overages (cough recent Vercel scandals cough) nor has to think about usage patterns that fit into arbitrary quotas, nor about surprises that catch up to you if you use the service at scale.
This is the way to do small utilities that have a cloud cost; services of the 'save you the trouble of self-hosting' type, or the 'tool somebody writes once, and people might use occasionally for years' pattern.
Maybe not the way to extract maximum value and growth for an ambitious startus, but a good choice for the many modest niche services out there.