In April 2024, PlanetScale killed its free tier. Not for new users — for everyone. Five gigabytes of MySQL storage and a billion row reads per month, gone. Production databases had to migrate on a deadline. No grandfathering, no gradual phase-out. The tier that people had built real things on was simply removed.
PlanetScale wasn't the first and wasn't the last. Heroku killed its free dynos in 2022 after more than a decade, citing "fraud and abuse." SendGrid's "free 100 emails/day forever" became a 60-day trial in 2025. Firebase Cloud Storage moved its free 5GB to the paid plan in February 2026. The pattern is consistent enough that someone started tracking it: a "Free Tier Graveyard," chronological, each entry with a cause of death.
This is not a new story. Cory Doctorow named it "enshittification" in 2022 — the three-stage process where platforms are good to users, then abuse users to benefit business customers, then abuse business customers to extract value for shareholders. The American Dialect Society made it Word of the Year in 2023. The concept is settled.
What's worth looking at now is how the AI industry is running this cycle, because it's running it faster, with new lock-in mechanisms that previous platforms didn't have, and with a coordination pattern that means the competitive pressure that used to slow the cycle isn't functioning.
