Do you know that hosting is one of the nastiest business out there? Hardware, bandwidth suck up huge amounts of money and energy. But some hosting companies want to give it for free, forever. And people keep asking me “do you have a free plan?”
The problem is quite basic. Hosting the web's "hello world" applications for zero money is not a sustainable business model. Most of all, we should really ask ourselves: is it really useful to humanity? The problem with free offerings is that it’s killing product value: nobody really takes care of a free product.
At Clever Cloud, we have built a great platform.
We’ve worked with developers to help them build great applications, be more efficient, and sustain huge traffic surges without stress.
Our job is not to host unfinished side projects.
Hosting the web's "hello world" applications for zero money is not a sustainable business model. Most of all, we should really ask ourselves: is it really useful to humanity?
Since free tier costs money, who really pays for it? Loyal and paying customers, of course. And that’s just not fair. I prefer to say: our price is the right price. We are not making you pay for a poor marketing idea. If you are not ok with our price, don't worry.
We can always agree on something: just email us at sales@clever-cloud.com.
But the problem about free tier goes even deeper: this poor marketing strategy is lowering the overall customer perception of PaaS. What doesn’t have a price doesn’t have any value, and the idea that PaaS provides no value is a deeply entrenched misconception. This is one of the reasons the PaaS market has taken so long to emerge.
Can Clever Cloud ever be free?
Sure, we help open-source projects, charity, media and other projects by giving them free hosting. If you think your project deserves it, just send me an email: quentin.adam@clever-cloud.com.
Post Scriptum: I’m really happy to see Heroku changing their point of view on this and slowly nerfing their free trial offer. The industry, and the web in general, can only benefit from it.