They are trying to get as close as possible to the amount people are willing to pay before leaving - and they figured out how to do effective vendor lock-in - reduce onboarding friction, give away free credits in the start, price migrating out to oblivion, etc.<p>I don't really see how this will improve - new competitors will try to emulate the approach to reach similar margins, budget providers won't have the capital required to commoditize SaaS offerings.
This could work if you have people that know how to operate your server. I guess that it is not the same if you have your own rack in some data center and AWS servers. What about routers, networking and all of the other things?