Comment by BarryMilo
10 hours ago
Other commenters laughing at you for the price... It's not about the price it's about the barrier. Even if I love a service, I won't get very many people to try it if they need to enter a credit card.
10 hours ago
Other commenters laughing at you for the price... It's not about the price it's about the barrier. Even if I love a service, I won't get very many people to try it if they need to enter a credit card.
It's also a barrier for education.
Almost all technological choices I made as a teen were driven by "what hosting can I get for free, as my parents sure as hell won't put down their payment information for that". Back then that usually meant PHP and a max. 50MB MySQL.
If you've ever offered an online service, charging "the dollar" reduces a ton of spam/abuse you have to deal with.
I have been the service provider who had to paywall just to stop the spammers and you're right. But it's also true that kids will be collateral damage (or anyone without a credit card).
In my case, and it was the 90s, I took the time to setup a way to pay by calling a premium (1-900) for $1.49 number so the barrier to entry even for kids was still reasonable.
Maybe in modern day the equivalent is adding Google pay and Apple pay then you cover some kids at least (gift cards and such).
Quite the hassle for the provider, and it will turn away any person who cares about privacy. There's no way to win anymore.
4 replies →
If entering a credit card is too much you probably aren't a potential customer. Part of keeping a service low cost is keeping services efficient. Having a large pool of people using it for free who will never become customers will force the cost higher for those who do pay.
Good riddance to the "free" model. It's never actually free. You either pay with your data, or have to consume ads, or you're forcing other customers to pay for your free usage.
I get that credit cards are a barrier of entry but I’m more willing to give providers a break now that AI agents make it much easier to abuse free tiers. It’s also harder for smaller companies to offer free tiers. If we want a more diverse set of service providers we as customers need to be willing to accept some trade-offs.