Free tiers are a legitimate starting point, until the limits hit. Cold starts that make a records system feel broken, row caps that force a migration mid-project, egress fees that appear when usage grows.
The trap isn't the free tier, it's architecting around its constraints. A system designed to fit a free plan is a system designed around someone else's pricing page.
For most small systems, a $5 VPS beats a free tier: predictable limits, no cold starts, and a migration path that doesn't involve rewriting the data layer. Free is a prototype budget, not a production one.
