I wouldn't make categorical statements like that. Free forever (without the promise) has worked well for many businesses, for github/gitlab, to Google, to quite a few others. A few models which have worked:
1) Limited to a single user (no team use);
2) Not have appropriate compliance for corporate use;
3) Limited enough to be free to provide and not viable for any real-world use (e.g. 15 minutes / 100 API calls per month);
4) Incompatible licensing (AGPL/proprietary dual licensing is an example);
5) Making everything on the free model world-public (MANY rapid prototyping tools do this)
The goal is usually to be adequate for nights/weekends personal projects, open-source projects, and internal prototyping, but to require customers who can pay to need to pay. How you do that depends on your business.
The higher-level point is that working from categorical points is not good business strategy. As with any tool, something like free, free forever, etc. can be good or bad, depending on how it's used, and requires a careful case-by-case analysis. If you remove tools from your toolchain based on categorical guidelines, you will be at a disadvantage.
The nice piece about the "forever" is that people change jobs every 3 years. I exhausted my trial tiers at several vendors in my first job (several of which switched to paying). Guess who's not being experimented with in my current job? All the vendors whose free tiers I exhausted, but whom I didn't adopt.
1) Limited to a single user (no team use);
2) Not have appropriate compliance for corporate use;
3) Limited enough to be free to provide and not viable for any real-world use (e.g. 15 minutes / 100 API calls per month);
4) Incompatible licensing (AGPL/proprietary dual licensing is an example);
5) Making everything on the free model world-public (MANY rapid prototyping tools do this)
The goal is usually to be adequate for nights/weekends personal projects, open-source projects, and internal prototyping, but to require customers who can pay to need to pay. How you do that depends on your business.
The higher-level point is that working from categorical points is not good business strategy. As with any tool, something like free, free forever, etc. can be good or bad, depending on how it's used, and requires a careful case-by-case analysis. If you remove tools from your toolchain based on categorical guidelines, you will be at a disadvantage.
The nice piece about the "forever" is that people change jobs every 3 years. I exhausted my trial tiers at several vendors in my first job (several of which switched to paying). Guess who's not being experimented with in my current job? All the vendors whose free tiers I exhausted, but whom I didn't adopt.