This is great perspective about how assumptions play out over longer period of time. I think that this risk is much greater for free third party services for critical infrastructure.
Someone has to foot the bill somewhere and if there isn't a source of income then the project is bound to be unsupported eventually.
I think I would struggle to say that free services die at a higher rate consistently…
So many paid offerings, whether from startups or even from large companies, have been sunset over time, often with frustratingly short migration periods.
If anything, I feel like I can think of more paid services that have given their users short migration periods than free ones.
Nah, businesses go under all the time, whether their services are paid or not.
Counterexample: the Linux kernel
How? Big tech foots the bill.
But goo.gl is also big tech...
Google wasn't making money off of goo.gl
But what did it cost them? Especially in read only mode
Sure, an service more to monitor, while for the most part "fix by restart" is a good enough approach. And then once in a while have an intern switching to latest backend choice.
Linux isn't a service (in the SaaS sense).