They are clients if they found us to provide a service they needed, and we can provide it in a profitable way.

Our business found Mailgun to be a great solution when we anticipated clients would stick under 10k/mo and not need a card on file. With Stripe, every time they pay their cut, they've had a sale. Every time they mail-out through MailChimp, it's to a list of customers.

We are usually using Mailgun to send transactional emails. I can't promise a client that they won't get a flurry of junk signups or password reset mailouts that hit their credit card.

The bottom 50% of the market is heading to self-serve site-builders and it's savage for a small web business.

I'm completely with you on this.

The responses to your posts are disgusting. I don't think a lot of people around here understand what it means to provide services to small local businesses.

I don't know about you, but I'm in a smaller community, people here still earn $7.25 per hour, and I just don't have access to deep-pocketed big businesses. I work with small businesses, individual business owner/operators, and mom and pop type places. $35 here, $50 there - it all adds up fast, and they are very conscious of these costs, and so am I.

Going to a small business owner and trying to explain any kind of price hike for a service they thought was free is just another burden to them, and it makes MY recommendation of the original service seem bad .... and I'm the guy they came to for GOOD advice.

FWIW, as someone who built their career from Ogaki, Gifu, Japan, you're on the same Internet as most deep-pocketed businesses and can choose to pursue their custom at any time. Strongly consider doing so. Most technologists overrate how difficult it is.

I think most HNers currently serving mom-and-pops in a bespoke fashion should strongly consider exiting that market tomorrow. Those customers will, over time, gravitate to a Shopify or a site builder or similar because they can amortize engineering costs over 100,000 similarly situated customers and consultants can not.

I understand there are aesthetic reasons to prefer that non-tech-forward people in your local community have someone to ask questions to and help navigate options, but if you want you can throw free Set Up Your Shopify office hours every Friday as a pro bono gesture, underwritten by the piles and piles of money from the many businesses in the world that can afford professional labor.

> it makes MY recommendation of the original service seem bad

If your advice was "you get 10,000 emails per month free via $service" without qualifying "right now, but that isn't guaranteed forever, their paid tier is $x per 1000 emails and switching mail providers in the backend of your website will take approximately $Y hours at $chargable_rate", then it _was_ "bad advice" (or at the very least "incomplete advice").

I made this mistake way to many times before I learnt that lesson. (Most recently with Google Maps on websites...)

I think it's possible you're both right. There will be cases where you need to drop a client because they're not willing to pay you enough for keeping them to be profitable (parent's point). On the other hand, there's a whole "low-end" market available to some people who have the resources to band together a large number of very-low-profit customers into a product that ultimately still makes you money (your point). If you can find such a market, then providing a service to these people is economically justifiable.

Mailgun does not owe you or anyone a free tier.

Start charging your clients money to cover costs that comes with their business.

I think the ask is that we wished Mailgun did that from the start instead of creating messes later in the process.

I don't mind them having a free tier and tweaking their offering. But I think grandfathering in older accounts is nicer, and I wish it was easier to work with accounts in a technical role when you are not technically the client, but are acting for them in most ways.

e.g., I can set up their account and other technical parts after that, but I can't verify their mobile number (added since we started working with Mailgun), don't have their credit card details to put on file (same), and often end up agreeing to legal notices for them rather than asking them to complete signup (and stalling the project).

Mailgun also wished that you'd have signed up as a full paying customer when you first wanted their service. But they knew they weren't gonna get what they wished for either...

Never assume free tiers will last forever. Recognize they are often a way to entice people into the system. And that often they change as the business grows. Thus don’t build your business that depends on free tiers.

Unless the vendor has more to lose than gain if they started charging.

Discount stocks brokers make more money on float than trades.

Search engines make enough off ads instead of charging per search.

Photoshop didn’t have a free tier, but rampant piracy from home users created proficient corporate users.

They literally offered a free tier!

My original point was not even anything to do with cost but hassle!

In most businesses "hassle" and "cost" are synonyms...

Exactly. My business lifted off when I realized my market isn't the people who benefit from what I'm selling. My market is people who benefit from what I'm selling, and are willing to pay for value.

Freeloaders are simply not in my market.

And with that focus, I've been able to exponentially improve the value of what my company provides.

A lot of my clients fit this. What I’ve done to “solve” it for us, is to stop charging for hosting and “services” each month and realistically price it in to the initial contract. A lot of our projects are between £5k and £20k. I don’t want to be raising invoices for £20 or £30 per month. Their corporate finance department doesn't want to be processing small amounts each month either. All these projects have limited lifespan - 1 year or 2 or most. It makes sense for all involved to just price it in early. They like it, I like it. Sometimes projects run longer, sometimes they run short, on aggregate, it seems to work for us and them. Yes, if something goes nuts and costs thousands a month, that’s a conversation you want to have quickly, but in that scenario, the traffic they are getting is leading a different conversation anyway. YMMV.

You could align incentives this way by structuring the deal to include a three year "service and support" component. You can build that in to provide a fixed cost yet at the same time have the flexibility to charge more if your cost structure has changed after the time passes.