It's easy to come up with practical segmentation strategies and we should pursue them. An obvious one is jacking up the free tier, from $30/quarter to something much higher, like $1000/quarter.

I mean, maybe the right answer is just to make the whole thing free. I don't know. I just know it's more complicated than the standard message board discourse suggests.

$30/quarter doesn't look like a "free tier" in the first place

It is. If you incur less than $30 in PACER charges in a quarter, they waive the bill.