Mongodb
MongoDB gave its database away free for seven years and built the largest developer community in the market. Then Atlas charged for the cloud version. Developers who learned it at university brought it to their CTO.
MongoDB gave its database software away for free in 2009. Any developer could download it and build an application without contacting a sales team. Millions did. The company had no revenue and the largest developer community in the database market. The free product was not the business. The cloud version was. MongoDB Atlas launched in 2016 as a fully managed cloud database. Same software, but MongoDB handled infrastructure, security, backups, and scaling. A developer who built their app on the free version could migrate to Atlas and pay based on data stored and queries processed. The migration was one click. The lock-in was years of code written for MongoDB's query language.
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