Fair enough, you’re right to be skeptical.
Just to add info, the deal marketing has a lot to do with how that marketplace itself displays deals.
There are a plethora of ways a purchase like this can go bad, some are:
- Product dies.
- Product stays alive, but is hardly maintained.
- New features or limits are added in the future and are not included with the purchase, then the product slowly becomes less useful over time.
- Product has success and is acquired, with purchased plans being dropped off in the process because ‘reasons’.
- Any number of sketchy ways to mess with the purchased limits, like increasing credit consumption per action etc.
- Deal is simply not honoured in the future.
With this deal, imo, the main costs being risked are:
- Time or dev cost for implementing it (and replacing it later if it doesn’t work out)
- Any negative consequences due to unexpected issues/bugs
The dollar cost itself is very minimal when compared to other similar monthly/usage billed solutions. So if thinking of it from the perspective of just the product dollar cost, it should be a fairly short amount of time before a buyer is ‘in the green’ compared to other solutions with the same quota. So the risk/reward in that regard is quite good imo, especially considering there is a 60d refund period.
Even a small subscription can add up quick, e.g. 6 EUR (~$7 USD) will end up costing 72 EUR (~$84 USD) annually. Free plans are great, but notorious for getting rug pulled. Due to being free, the provider has minimal obligation to continue providing that free service long term.
A lot of companies do deals like this to get enthusiastic users providing feedback for a young product, finding edge case bugs etc. Basically ensuring their product is battle tested. I think for an ESP that owns their own infrastructure (they have a small datacenter and their own IP block), it’s probably quite a sound strategy.