Most of these platform have reached their critical mass to stay in business (and time to attract the customers like you) only because of the free tier.
Sorry but even a low cost tier is too much for most wanting to give a try to a new infrastructure/stack. Most of these adoptions come from hobby projects trying it first and then recommending to use it in a professional setting. In a professional setting yes. you can afford to pay to low cost to evaluate it but you cant afford the time to do so. So they always rightly offer a trade of time to evaluate for the free cost. This is what actually brings the initial customers.
Do you have examples of companies in this space that actually reached break-even? Heroku never hit profitability as far as I remember and with the Salesforce acquisition the question of profitability is moot. AWS is a counter-example to using a free tier as a GTM strategy. AWS did not start with a free-tier offering for S3 or EC2, that only came years later. By then they already had significant traction in the market.
I don't know if they have reached break-even. I know that they are in business for a long time and are clearly getting investments based on the usage and the potential. Usage that would not be there were it not for the Free time contributed to test-drive their offering and the free "evangelizing" done by those "free-loaders". AWS/Google/Microsoft are in a different league because they can afford the waiting game for actual Enterprise Evaluations or can afford massive sale forces (Azure case). Smaller players can not afford it and have to rely on "recommendations" based on past experiences.
