A large part of the issue with pricing on Google App Engine (which is the one that still stings for many people) - was that they were building on a relatively proprietary platform.
The advantage of Docker based compute engines is that your lock-in is a lot lower - providers have to compete on price and features without locking customers in.
Where I work, we're always balancing using new AWS features against how hard it would be to migrate out to another provider or take our solutions on-premises.
I recently went on holidays and was merrily tethered away on 4G to Telstra. Hit the cap limit on my plan - 3GB - called Telstra to get a datapack add-on - "I'm sorry, but you are on the highest plan, we can't add on any more data".
Basically I would have had to sign onto a completely new contract to get more data for the 5 days to end of month. Ridiculous.
I guess the main issue is that the timeline of events has gone like this:
Snowden/Guardian: NSA is doing X
Govt/NSA: We are not doing X
Snowden/Guardian: Here are some slide/proof
Govt/NSA: Ok we are doing X, but it's for your own good.
Rinse and repeat each fortnight.
So each denial means less and less, and tips believability towards Snowden even where the proof is inconclusive in some cases.
Could be that the active user base of mixpanel has dropped slightly while people are offline to upgrade. Would depend on exactly how their metrics are being gathered.
None-the-less I find it amazing that ~20% of their sample base is already upgraded.
The advantage of Docker based compute engines is that your lock-in is a lot lower - providers have to compete on price and features without locking customers in.
Where I work, we're always balancing using new AWS features against how hard it would be to migrate out to another provider or take our solutions on-premises.