When the Free Tier Stops Being Cheap: A Load-Based Exit Test for Agent Backends
When the Free Tier Stops Being Cheap: A Load-Based Exit Test for Agent Backends A team moves its nightly agent job onto a free endpoint. Week one looks perfect. Week four, the queue drains ten minutes late and the on-call engineer has no data. The endpoint did not break. The workload changed shape around it. Free tiers rarely fail loudly; they fail as latency, retries, and quiet queue debt. This post is a stop rule, not a sales pitch. It gives you one probe, one decision table, and a set of exi…