Hi Alex,
I think maybe you misunderstood the intention of providing the latest instance for people to check out.
Firstly we are not asking people to check out our “test instance”, we are providing them an easy way to Demo the latest release.
From my experience over the past few years we have seen many problems with upgrading and people are very hesitant to do so, what Surge is providing is the latest instance where people can actually go and see the latest updates and bug fixes for themselves.
I personally do not think that the forum is the best place to pick up new business and that is not our intention over here. The intention is to provide support and contribute to the community (as we have done with the SMS plugin and provider we have recently released), the numerous tutorials we have released on using the referral plugin, creating a super useful dashboard with Metabase and a full tutorial on how to actually install Metabase.
I myself spend a good few hours every month answering questions and providing support to community members both here, on the slack channel, private messages, emails and many times jumping on calls with community members that are stuck in a fix - all gratis.
Surge along with myself are big supporters of the Open Source Community and will continue to contribute wherever and however we can.
I do hope this clears some things up.
I am open to continue discussing this topic with the rest of the forum 
Regards,
Mike