Free Infrastructure Tiers Keep Expanding, Pricing Power Erodes
Bunny CDN announced they are making their DNS service free, eliminating per-query fees and offering free DNS for up to 500 domains. Minimus also announced their container hardening images are now free. Both announcements landed on HN the same day, with commenters on the Bunny thread noting they host 10-plus websites there and pay almost nothing already.
The pattern: infrastructure providers are increasingly using free tiers not as loss leaders to convert to paid, but as permanent features to drive ecosystem lock-in and CDN/compute upsell. Bunny is explicit that a faster internet is the goal, but the business logic is clear: DNS is cheap at scale, and making it free cements customer relationships on the CDN side.
The Minimus thread raised a sharper question: why use Minimus over Docker Hardened Images or Chainguard, both of which also have free hardened image tiers? When multiple players in a category all go free simultaneously, it signals the feature is commoditized and the real competition is happening one layer up.
So what?
Infrastructure costs for early-stage products are approaching zero for a growing number of components. DNS, basic CDN, and hardened container images are now effectively free from multiple providers. If you are still paying for any of these at small scale, audit your stack. The flip side: if you are building in infrastructure, the free tier arms race means you need a clear answer to why your paid tier is worth it.