Provide an option for fixed monthly payments

Provide an option for fixed monthly payments

Hello Catalyst team,

I am sure this would have been considered, so I am not proposing this as if it is a new idea. I am just commenting on something I am seeing in the world of "serverless". If I am completely wrong with my assessment, I would also like to know why. Obviously you folks are actually working on the product, and I am just commenting as an outsider.

As a Dialogflow consultant (Dialogflow is Google-owned), it is quite easy for me to see that using Google serverless functions will be more cost effective than using Heroku. But I never recommend it to my clients.

And the serverless cloud vendors seem to be completely oblivious to the requirements of the really small businesses. Since Zoho does seem to care more about small businesses, I really hope Catalyst implements a fixed price monthly service with a way to halt the service if user exceeds the resource allocation (i.e. don't auto-scale).

Here are a few reasons off the top of my head:
- A small business would not be hurt by paying $10-15 a month for a fixed resource allocation, even if they heavily underuse it. No small business would think that saving $180/yr is "huge" savings for their web application. On the other hand, the notion of unlimited downside is very much stress inducing. I don't want to be talking to Google support team to waive the $1000 bill I accidentally racked up by doing something stupid in my code.
- Very rarely do these cloud vendors actually back up their (admittedly excellent) tech with adequate support. On top of getting unexpected bills, now I need to deal with generally poor support also and add to my stress levels. With all due respect, Zoho itself does not have a particularly shining reputation when it comes to support
- There is a reason why a lot of people still default to Heroku, even if it can get quite expensive for some configurations. The actual resources you get is plenty for most small apps, so most of us know we will never hit the higher priced tiers.
- If we DO hit the higher priced tiers, we would gladly pay for it, because usually it happens because the business has grown to require those higher prices
- Online I often hear the argument (often made by employees at these cloud vendors) that the auto-scaling is something which is very important for their customers. I find that quite hard to believe, but even if it is true for the enterprises, I really doubt that it is true for the smaller businesses. I think a small business would rather go offline for a few hours and figure out what happened than face the unlimited downside I talked about before.
- Last but not least, and honestly I don't know why no one talks about this - nearly all small businesses prefer boring old tech which is stable and where it is easy to find documentation, rather than trying to stay on top of the latest Kubernetes breakthrough. The large serverless cloud vendors are really annoying their customers in the race to provide shiny new tech because the documentation never keeps up with the technology. Boring old tech wins hands down here.

Specifically in comparison to Heroku, I think Zoho Catalyst could find a market by competing on the basis of having a DB pre-integrated into the cloud environment. When I first saw that, I thought "Finally someone gets it!". Maybe your existing DB is limited in some ways, I don't really know. But I am glad to see you are making some progress in that direction. This also makes it easier to recommend to people building backends for their Dialogflow bots, because non-programmers can log into Zoho Catalyst and inspect the data without asking the programmer to build an admin interface for the data. In this sense, Catalyst's DB is a bit like Airtable, which does a really good job on this front.

If you add a fixed price tier to your services which is comparable in price to Heroku's lower tiers, and provide Python support, I would gladly move my future web apps to ZC and also recommend it to my Dialogflow clients.

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