Five years of free tiers
We have never put an expiry on a free tier. Here is what that actually costs us and why the number is smaller than people assume.
Every API on the platform has had a free tier since 2015, and none of them has ever expired. We get asked about the economics of this often enough that it is worth publishing the actual figures.
What it costs
Free tier usage is about four per cent of total platform request volume. The marginal cost of serving it is real but small — it is the same infrastructure, sized for peak paid load, absorbing free traffic in the gaps.
The larger cost is support. Free accounts open tickets at a slightly higher rate than paid ones, which makes sense: they are more likely to be someone integrating for the first time. We answer them at the same priority, and that is a deliberate expense rather than an oversight.
What it returns
Roughly a third of paid accounts had a free tier key for more than sixty days before anyone paid us anything. The median gap between first free call and first invoice is just under four months.
That is the whole argument. Four months is longer than any trial period would have been. Those accounts were evaluating on their own schedule, and a fourteen-day clock would have forced a decision at the point of least information, when the integration was half-built and the value was not yet visible.
Why not a trial
A trial is a deadline you impose on someone else's project. Projects slip for reasons that have nothing to do with your product — a reorganisation, a launch, a person leaving. When the trial expires mid-slip, the integration is abandoned and rarely resumed, because resuming means going back to procurement.
A free tier that does not expire means the half-finished integration is still there in March when the project restarts.
The rule we hold to
The free tier has to be enough to build something real. Not a demo — a working feature, at low volume, in production. If a free tier is only enough to run the sample request, it is a trial with extra steps and developers can tell immediately.
Where a provider has pushed back on this, we have generally not listed them.