This isn't an answer to how they might monetize this service and quite frankly I've seen the OP/Co-Founder post their "answer" to this question on multiple other comments and it's extremely hand-wavy. I currently have little to no faith that this product isn't going to leave anyone that uses it stranded in a year or so when they have to shutdown due to lack of revenue.
Haggy - we have no plans to charge individual developers for low volume workflows that fit within our defined constraints. Our revenue efforts will be focused on enterprise use cases.
I have no desire to be hand-savvy so please ask whatever questions you have and I will do my best to clarify.
Hi, this is Dylan, another co-founder and engineer. I'm sorry we dropped the ball here. As you can imagine, it's tough to respond to every request and we've been a bit busy since launch, but I apologize we didn't get to yours.
All of us were early employees of BrightRoll [1], an advertising marketplace that handled 10 million requests / second at peak. We've scaled large systems in the past and we've built this system with scale in mind.
Believe it or not, most workflows are extremely low volume. That, in part with the design of the system, allows us to offer the generous free tier.
We're planning to introduce paid tiers soon. You can see my comment on the parent thread that addresses some of the general questions around pricing asked by others in the thread.
This was a very early release of the platform and we hoped offering the product for free would encourage experimentation. To a great degree, we've seen that, so we think it was the right choice.
I really don't like it when new services leave out the pricing and hide it under "contact us".
Testing and trying something new requires time and effort, which is limited, especially for companies that would be interested, if pricing/future isn't crystal clear, why make the effort?
If you do not need enterprise use cases (single sign-on, higher level SLAs, shared authentication, etc) and your scale fits within our defined constraints, then free is the price.
to me that translates as "WARNING! TRAP!" because I may decide I like your thing, and then my users may decide they like _my_ thing, and then suddenly I find out what your price is for my scale and "oh shit! I'm going to go broke OR have to recode everything"
ESPECIALLY since this would become a key part of the infrastructure / how my app gets its stuff done. Replacing your service with a competitor or something homebrew would be a major pain, especially when I find myself unexpectedly popular.
there is NO WAY I would ever use or recommend a service that refuses to tell me what my potential long term costs are up front.
It's too much of a gamble with a business or worse, a hobby project that isn't making me any money to compensate for this unexpected "balloon payment".
Vendors that are aiming at a split workflow, with a free tier and a paid tier usually have some set paid tiers and then a “contact us” for beyond that. For example, Slack gives you prices for the Standard and Support plans, and then lets enterprises contact them for negotiating prices. The problem with Pipedream is that non-enterprise customers will want to use their so-called enterprise plan.
