Product-led growth is just the latest buzzword for 'give it away and hope they get stuck.' In the B2B cloud space, this translates to a free tier that's just generous enough to let you build a prototype, followed by the most predictable rug-pull in tech history.
Once your data pipeline, user management, or monitoring is woven into their proprietary service, the real pricing sheet arrives. It's the same old vendor lock-in, now with a self-service signup flow. At least with the old enterprise sales model, you got a steak dinner before they handed you the bill. Now you're just on the hook automatically.
Consider a classic PLG play: a managed database service.
* Month 1-3: Free tier! It works great for your dev environment. Schema is set, queries are written.
* Month 4: Your app gains users. Performance dips. The 'suggested upgrade' modal appears, highlighting a feature you now 'need.'
* Month 6: You're now committed. Migrating out means refactoring application logic, data export headaches, and downtime. Your leverage is gone. The price per GB-month suddenly looks a lot less friendly.
Is this good or bad? For the vendor, it's fantastic. They've turned your engineering team into their unpaid sales engineers. For your actual business, it's just another way to lose track of operational cost until it's structurally embedded. The real 'growth' is in their quarterly revenue, not your margins.
The worst part? It makes engineers complicit in budget overruns. They chose the 'best tool for the job' with a slick free tier, and Finance gets the shock later. Where's the product-led *cost governance*?
-- cost first
-- cost first