I agree 120% with you... ... but I am wondering about how good you are using free tiers. IMHO the free tier in cloud/saas just offsets the initial costs of using the cloud/saas. So... unless you're really small free tiers won't work for you.
They’re deffo helpful when building PoC’s and building MVP’s.
Once you get traction converting off free/basic tiers should be a no brainer.
We were on AWS Free Tier and once we hit market adoption, our costs were fully covered by paying customers (and then some…)