If It's Free, You're The Product
There's an old saying on the Internet - if it's free, you're the product...
Thereβs an old saying in tech circles, which goes something along the lines of:
On the Internet, if a product is free, youβre the product.
I recently switched from WordPress to Jekyll and hosting is now provided by the free tier of Netlify. Itβs a great service that automatically builds and deploys my site whenever I do a git push
.
I canβt help but think about the quote above though - am I the product here? Should I be paying for my static site hosting? Netlify offer a pro tier, but itβs $19/month, which is more than Iβd care to pay for hosting.
Maybe I should consider another hosting provider, like AWS Amplify, Digital Oceanβs App Platform or God forbid the newly announced Cloudflare pages.
I still have my trusty VPS with Ionos (albeit recently migrated from CentOS to Ubuntu, because, you know, reasons). Maybe I could come up with a way of automatically deploying my site from Git using my VPS - Plesk already has Git integration, so maybe it would be trivial.
I should look into that.
What do you think, dear reader? By using Netlifyβs free hosting tier, am I the product here?