Comment by specialp
3 days ago
This is a growing pattern in hosting like Netlify and headless CMSs like Sanity. Their free model is "generous" and then if you go production and start to have overages you get billed exorbitantly for bandwidth and API requests. It is essentially a trap. Once you hit those limits you have very little negotiating power when you hit the "call us for pricing" level and you get outrageous quotes. It costs them very little to run these services so if they can net some minnows that become whales, that is almost pure profit.
It's the double-edged sword of both free plans and "transparent pricing". If you just click "buy" and enter your CC info you're subject to their somewhat arbitrary terms of service. Service is cheap and reliable so you don't ask questions. But they can just boot you and there's very little recourse. It's why most big companies want a signed contract that's binding and comes with some kind of mandatory dispute resolution or penalties for non-compliance.