It's hard for me to decide if it's genius or insane. This "fair use policy" really makes me nervous about the whole thing.

The primary driver here is moving from a hosting company to a workflow/developer productivity company. If you're using ZEIT for staging/test deployment previews or hosting SSG or hybrid SSR/SSG Next.js it all pencils out nicely. It definitely doesn't work for the original container-first model.

They were in that space already.

With this new pricing model, it feels like we're getting a generous "free tier" on the platform, but it's implicit.

The "Hobby Plan" section in the ToS sounds like a risky thing to sign up for https://zeit.co/legal/terms#hobby-plan

I'm a solo dev. I won't sign up for the "Pro" plan in the foreseeable future

Also, this "Platform limits" page doesn't make much sense now https://zeit.co/docs/v2/platform/limits