The situation you’re describing is exceptionally niche and one in which you can simply reach out to the company and ask for accommodation: there’s thousands of open-source projects sponsored by for-profit companies by granting access to paid services for free (your employer is one of them, Fastly sponsor a bunch of projects by giving free CDN).
Asking a company to sell their services to everyone at a huge loss because a minority of open-source projects can’t afford their service is more ridiculous.
It's literally the situation I was in before so: why are you trying so hard to gaslight what is a perfectly valid question? They probably have a good reasons for there not to be a middle tier: if so, cool, but it feels missing so hopefully they read HN comments and can explain why the first paid plan jumps straight to $50.
A challenge many startups face is undervaluing their service. You started out by saying that their service was too expensive — “that's a lot of money to the vast majority =(” — which is the sort of complaint that induces founders to think they need to lower their prices. They don’t. Most startups should be charging more. $50 is nothing to the customers that Trigger want to attract in order to succeed.
I have no beef with your point about open-source developers having very limited budgets, but it’s very important to contextual your feedback. You specifically talked about teams of multiple people, it was unclear you intended to describe a very niche situation.
Thanks for the clarification. I took your comment as a personal assault from the phrasing, accusing me of being a hypocrite because I happen to draw a paycheque these days. Thank you for explaining that wasn't the intention.
Asking a company to sell their services to everyone at a huge loss because a minority of open-source projects can’t afford their service is more ridiculous.