I think it's your business decision how much quota you want to give away for free and how much you charge for each DAU.
But the current free plan has a few issues (I would even call them traps):
It has a monthly DAU and API request limit. If this limit is exhausted Zitadel will essentially shut down the service until the end of the month, unless you switch to the Pro plan, or just accept getting locked out until the end of the month.
The DAU restriction can be safeguarded by only onboarding 3 users, then the DAU quota will never be exhausted.
The API limit is even more tricky, if your users heavily use the console or log in very often it is out of your control.
This makes the Zitadel free plan practically just a demo version (1 admin user, 1 test account, 1 service account). In my case I nearly hit the quota already after 5 days of developing a product, just me, developing alone. I ended up switching to auth0, because I was not very invested in Zitadel yet.
I know it’s our decision, but I wanted to get a sense of how our pricing looks to people from a less biased perspective. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts!
I’ll take your points for a spin internally. We’ve already had some ideas that address some of your concerns, especially around the quotas.
I set up Zitadel Cloud for the services at home, just for a few basic services (professionally I'm mostly using AAD and Keycloak).
Already with one user per family member we are coming dangerously close to the quotas, it's my fault, I didn't take the time to check the terms and conditions. But I honestly did not expect the free plan to be that restrictive. I just stopped at "100 users" and thought: "well, that should be enough". That's why I'm warning everyone about this fact.
But the current free plan has a few issues (I would even call them traps):
It has a monthly DAU and API request limit. If this limit is exhausted Zitadel will essentially shut down the service until the end of the month, unless you switch to the Pro plan, or just accept getting locked out until the end of the month.
The DAU restriction can be safeguarded by only onboarding 3 users, then the DAU quota will never be exhausted.
The API limit is even more tricky, if your users heavily use the console or log in very often it is out of your control.
This makes the Zitadel free plan practically just a demo version (1 admin user, 1 test account, 1 service account). In my case I nearly hit the quota already after 5 days of developing a product, just me, developing alone. I ended up switching to auth0, because I was not very invested in Zitadel yet.