Five weeks of engineering. Five paid users.
Five weeks of intense engineering. We rewrote our tuning logic to improve node capacity drastically. We executed a complex database migration away from SQLite, managing the entire process with zero downtime. It was a massive, frustrating undertaking that pushed our system's architecture forward.
The reward for all that effort? Exactly five paid users. One of them asked for a refund 🥹
Meanwhile, our free tier was thriving — but for all the wrong reasons. We offered a highly generous free plan that grew to 30 concurrent requests, rivaling the performance of our original Pro plan, which was 25. Isn't that a crazy improvement we made?
But instead of attracting developers who wanted to build real applications and provide valuable feedback, we became a magnet for system abusers.
The cost of "free"
When you run complex proxy and scraping infrastructure, "free" is never actually free. The compute, the bandwidth, and the engineering hours have to come from somewhere.
What I found was that a generous free plan attracts uncommitted users and bad actors. People were flooding in to exploit the nodes aggressively. Instead of focusing on product development, I spent my time fighting off these users, patching abuse vectors, and deviating from the roadmap. The free tier quickly became our highest source of churn and our biggest operational headache.
When you offer something valuable for nothing, the people who show up often don't care about the product. They just want the compute for free.
The breakthrough: cutting the dead weight
The technical reality is that scaling node infrastructure requires constant optimisation. You cannot maintain a high-availability proxy network while actively fighting off bots consuming your resources for free.
Because of this, we are officially removing the free tier. All free plans and free trials expire on 2026-09-04 — no free trial for anyone.
By killing it, we eliminate the noise. We are introducing a Nano testing tier to create a minimal financial barrier that filters out abusers while keeping it accessible for developers who actually want to test the system.
For this transition month only, all testing nodes remain free — for a small amount of time. There's more reason to it, but you have to email me directly to get access. It cannot be purchased in Razorpay. You first communicate with me, then pay with UPI for testing. And a fair warning: a Nano pass is for testing — if your workload is too large, that's a problem, and we'll tell you so.
If you aren't willing to send an email, you aren't the kind of user we're building for.
To get testing access: deepesh@snowpad.io
Thanks
To everyone who tested the free tier and gave real feedback — thank you. The experiment did its job; it taught us what you actually need. Now we get back to building it.
