It's particularly painful if a free tier user spins up a database and then walks away - and the DbaaS provider is left with a bill that you can't pass onto AWS.

This is why many providers have started suspending free tier infra after X days idle. But even letting idle instances run for 24hrs can run up huge bills at free tier scale.

In addition to all this the word gets out that a particular DbaaS prodiver gives you free high quality of service databases and more and more people show up and not pay

Here are some common ways providers try and reduce the burn:

- Put up a Credit Card wall - limit who can access the free tier. You free service is not really free.

- Overcommit VMs. At least one provider is doing that and as a result you get slow and unpredictable performance on the free tier.

- Spin up databases quickly to avoid users going away while you spinning them up. Then you are left with the bill

- Be very aggressive turning databases off. 7 days might be too expensive

And there is also a better way. @neondatabase serverless:

- Databases instances shut down in 5 min and spin back up on demand in 200-300ms. This is *mostly* invisible to the users and database is just a URL

- Delivering on this requires separating storage and compute and keeping a warm pool of VMs around

- You can further optimize storage by making it multitenant and integrated into S3

-Unused data flows to the cheapest storage medium

- Never use EBS. Local SSDs and S3 are the only storage primitives allowed

- Even with ALL that @neondatabase feels free tier is too expensive and we will go on another COGs reduction journey. Next set of ideas are denser packing of VMs and ARM CPUs

@nikitabase I have a very stupid question. Why can't you just multitenant free tier people, give them no performance or isolation SLAs, and just allow them to familiarize with interface?

@marsupialtail_2 A big step is to allow people run a small app 24/7

@nikitabase Great thread / thanks for sharing this!!

@nikitabase @andyhattemer Maybe the lesson here is "database as a service" shouldn't have a free tier?

@nikitabase @MohamedElqdusy @rattibha