Three emails per day. I was recently working on a tool for work where I wanted to send a report to a mailing list only three times per day. A quick search gave me the same big names I was already familiar with. I started looking into each one and became frustrated. Not a single provider would do it for free without treating me like a sales prospect first. It is as though the small project isn’t worth their time unless it comes with a purchase order.
The large companies like Twilio and Sinch seem to have abandoned the small projects that once grew into the big businesses that made them what they are today. Heroku, pioneer in container deployment and the go-to for proof of concept hosting, has gone into what is essentially maintenance mode. No new enterprise contracts, no new accounts, and their free tier has been gone for years. Clockwise, the freemium calendar management software, gave customers one week’s notice before shutting down entirely, paid customers included.
I’m not naive enough to think everything should be free, or that companies with staff shouldn’t charge for their services. But it does place a real limit on what indie developers and skunkworks projects can build on a tight budget. I realize the irony. MAVIS has a free trial rather than a free tier, partly because the services I’d need to make that possible aren’t free to me anymore. If I had started this project five years ago, that calculation would have looked very different.
Until a new generation of freemium services emerges, indie developers are left choosing between workarounds, out-of-pocket costs, or just going without. None of those options are great for innovation, and the next big app might never get built because of it.