My 2 cents' worth: You need to make it free for real for the first x people who sign up, not "Free, Read-Only". LOL.

And you need a strategy. You need to target one specific group to start with, otherwise it will never take off.

Hey I'm sorry for the confusion. This isn't my project, that's why I didn't use a Show HN or anything. I'm not in a position to make changes.

Clearly, that can run 50K users and TB of storage easily on few $50 dedicated servers, I don't understand why talking about payment at all at this stage, maybe OP is run this "in the cloud" with absurd costs?