Product13 August 20264 min read

A free tier is not a trial

A trial that expires is a deadline. A free tier that never expires lets you prototype on your own schedule and upgrade when traffic justifies it.

Trials optimise for the vendor. They create urgency, and urgency converts. They also mean an engineer evaluating your product is doing it against a clock they did not set.

What we do instead

Every listing has a tier that does not expire. It is small — a hundred calls a month — but it is permanent, and it is enough to build the whole integration before anyone has to approve a purchase order.

The trade

We convert more slowly and later. We also stop losing the evaluation that got parked for a fortnight because a sprint went sideways.

Keep reading

One error envelope across every provider

Normalising upstream failures is unglamorous work. It is also the single thing developers thank us for most.

Rate limiting without punishing bursty clients

Sliding windows, token buckets, and why we settled on a hybrid that absorbs a 10x burst without letting a runaway loop drain your quota.

Why we publish our p99, not our p50

Median latency is a marketing number. The tail is what pages your on-call. Here is every percentile we measure and how we collect it.