April 2025 was a tough month for developer free tiers. With 5 negative changes versus 0 positive, the trend continues toward tighter limits and eliminated offerings. Developers relying on free tiers should review their dependencies.
5
Total Changes +3 vs last month
5
Negative +3 vs last month
0
Positive
0
Neutral
Changes by Type
Change Type
Count
Pricing Restructured
2
Free Tier Removed
2
Limits Reduced
1
Biggest Losers
Vendors whose changes cost users more
Devin (1 negative change: pricing changed)
Launched $20/month Core plan with pay-as-you-go ACU pricing, down from previous $500/month-only Team plan Source ↗
Free tier reduced from 5,000 to 3,000 emails/month. maileroo.com/pricing said "send up to 5,000 emails per month at no cost" in the Internet Archive's copy of 2024-12-19 and "send up to 3,000 emails per month at no cost" in its copy of 2025-04-27. Source ↗
Papertrail (1 negative change: free tier removed)
Papertrail removed its $0 plan from its plans page between 2025-04-15 and 2025-04-22, replacing it with Log Observability at $5.00 per GB per month and a 30-day trial. Source ↗
DBOS (1 negative change: free tier removed)
DBOS replaced its free DBOS Cloud plan ($0 a month, "Free forever": 100,000 requests a day, 1,000,000 ms of CPU a month, 1 application) with DBOS Pro at $99 a month with a 30-day free trial, between captures of 2025-03-21 and 2025-04-04. The open-source DBOS Transact library stays free. Source ↗
Cloudflare for Startups (1 negative change: pricing changed)
Cloudflare split its startup programme into four funding tiers and capped bootstrapped startups at $5K. In the Internet Archive's capture of 2025-04-08, cloudflare.com/forstartups credited "up to $250,000 worth of service" to startups meeting one of its criteria. In the capture of 2025-04-17 a startup had to meet all of them, including "Funded up to series B", and the tiers were "$5K: Bootstrapped / Stealth Startups", "$25K: Up-and-coming Startups", "$100K: Seed-funded Startups" and "$250K: High Growth Startups". Source ↗