Comment by mkozlows
4 hours ago
I mean, your employer will pay it. $1K/month is cheap for your employer.
But there is an interesting point about what it does to hobby dev. If it takes real money just to screw around for fun on your own, it's kinda like going back to the old days when you needed to have an account on a big university system to do anything with Unix.
Open source software
Small bootstrapped startups
Are more what I had in mind. Of course an established company can pay it. I don't like the idea of a world where all software is backed by big companies
I'm not too worried about startups: We used to have startups when they had to buy expensive physical servers and pay for business-class T1 connections and rent offices and all that. The idea that you can start a company with $20 and a dream is relatively new, and honestly a little bit of friction might be good.
But yeah, I share your concern about open source and hobby projects. My hope would be that you get free tiers that are aimed at hobby/non-profit/etc stuff, but who knows.