Is caching not available if you don’t pay?it seems that hasura cloud is a paid offering. It also doesn’t seem like it works with the self hosted offering. Any plans for that?
Caching isn't discouraged or disabled in any way in the community edition of Hasura.
In terms of query-plan caching - which provides a lot of benefits for speeding up pre-query execution - that's already enabled by default as part of the Hasura engine.
Response caching is a little more complicated and requires a separate service outside of the main GraphQL server to keep the solution generalized (ex. redis, memcached, lots of other options).
We're definitely looking at ways to have some more examples as to how someone could go about rolling their own caching solution for self-hosted instances.
In the case of hosted solutions to caching, there's Hasura Cloud which pairs the cache with monitoring and some other usability and security niceties - but you could also use a service like GraphCDN (there are a couple other as well) in front of your Hasura instance which helps setup response caching.