New tasklist
We have been watching you. Not you personally, of course. Besides qualified and quantified feedback rounds we have been measuring your (our users) behavior on our platform. These learnings resulted in a new experiment: The tasklist.
We want to higher your engagement and give you a better experience when using our platform in the right way. In other words: Here comes a more fair and more fun freemium model.
About freezing
After a certain time of "inactivity" we automatically "freeze" free Apps. Frozen Apps are no longer available, but the data (web+mysql) is archived and can be "unfrozen" with a click in the dashboard. In the App overview in the dashboard you can see when your App will freeze. To avoid freezes you can reset the countdown timer in the dashboard at any time, or you can just upgrade to a paid plan.
We know that these freezes suck. It's true: Our free tier is not as good as we would like it to be, our aim is a valuable free development environment. But it is essential for us to balance our freemium and the paid plans. Otherwise we be spending lot's of computing resources for tons of "it works!" pages. We know that you hate the freezes. But interestingly most of the freeze complaints came from users looking for free web hosting. To this we must say: We don't want to be such a service.
A new model
Gamification is everywhere. Now also on fortrabbit. Free Apps now include a "tasklist". Perform certain optional tasks and get more time until your App freezes. Nearly two third of our freemium users don't use Git, they'll just use SFTP (or maybe SSH). This is ok, we are just encouraging not enforcing you to use best practice. But the point is that you will have the best experience when using our fast and easy Git push deployment. So obviously nearly two third of our paid users (AKA clients) are using Git deployment. You will probably even have more fun here when working with our super cool Composer Git hook. So you will also get some extra time for doing this. Further more we will value when you route a domain to your App.
In other words
Your recently created plain vanilla free App will freeze much sooner, but as soon as you really using it, you will get more time as before.
Further thinking
Please expect that the timing of the freeze bonuses will change in the future. We will see how good it works out and experiment with it. We will also add a "boarding bonus" soon. Here you will get credits for entering your credit card credentials. It's a kind of a opt-out free trial, where you can also test other advanced features like our workers our memcache Add-Ons. We hope you like this new 'feature', please tell us what you think.