Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Free Plans Don’t Work

softwarebyrob.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–118 of 118 posts

Re: Why Free Plans Don’t Work

#111

Post by StavrosK »

noverloop wrote: post #8

I think you should use a free plan if actively using the 'free' plan will eventually force the user to go to a paid plan. e.g. dropbox. If you just give your core product away for free then users will only switch if they need the extra features of the paid plan. You can still use 'free' for marketing, because total conversion rates with a free plan will probably be higher, just don't expect these 'free' customers to…

That's what we decided to do with historious [1] (bookmarking with full-text search in the content of the pages, and cached pages). You get 1000 bookmarks free, and you have to pay to get more.

This way, people who don't bookmark very much can live with 1000, and people who eventually will use more than 1000 need to subscribe...

I think it's a very good plan if your product is structured in a way that a user will eventually hit the limit, but I think Dropbox was not a very good example. If I hit the limit, I'll just delete a few files I don't need. I see your point, though, and I think you're mostly right.

[1] http://historio.us/

Re: Why Free Plans Don’t Work

#112

Post by ido »

bad_user wrote: post #99
damoncali wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows won because DOS was already everywhere. It wasn't the best product. I would argue OS/2 and Macintosh were pretty significantly better. It's not a coincidence that it took this long (Windows 7) for MS to produce a decent operating system - they are now having to compete on quality. But you don't even have to buy the argument that Windows was sub-par. It doesn't matter, because that's not why MS won. Just as MS…

Windows won because DOS was already everywhere. It wasn't the best product. I would argue OS/2 and Macintosh were pretty significantly better. No, they weren't. The hardware requirements OS/2 were higher, Windows had better drivers support and provided better tools for developers. And the real battle was in '94 when IBM released OS/2 Warp. In '95 it was already game over. People weren't using OS/2 for the same reason…

It seems a lot of people forget just how crummy mac os was before x.

I used OS 7.x for a good while, and it was generally speaking not better than its contemporary, windows 95.

In fact it might have been even worse, at least as far as multitasking and stability go.

Windows 98 SE was actually a fairly good system as long as you didn't overtax its somewhat limited multi-tasking ability & ran it on high quality hardware (far less crash prone than Mac OS 8.x)

Re: Why Free Plans Don’t Work

#113

Post by njharman »

revorad wrote: post #41
shadowsun7 wrote: post #26

I loved this article, but after thinking about it for a bit I realize that there is an argument for going free. Two pretty strong ones, in fact. 1) If you want to get acquired - and we're talking about a big acquisition here - it would do to go free so you manage to score a big-enough user base to get noticed. And so the bigger company is interested in acquiring you not only for your technology, but also for your use…

Going free also makes sense if you want total market dominance. In which case, free is really the only way to go. No it's not. The other way is to make the best damn product in the market. I hate to give cliched examples, but since we are talking market dominance, see Windows, Adsense and iPod.

Cheap(er) almost always beats better/best when the market is large. Walmart, fast food, webbrowsers. The main way a less cheap product wins a mass market is through massive advertising. Specialized and niche markets are different.

I'm not sure what your examples where suppose to illustrate. Both Windows and Adsence rule because of the (practical) monopoly positions of their creators. iPod's only one that may have dominated for being the better product but If google started giving away crappy media players they would quickly out dominate iPods.

Re: Why Free Plans Don’t Work

#114

Post by shadowsun7 »

revorad wrote: post #106
shadowsun7 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not always true, though. History is littered with examples of products that gained traction not because they were better, but because they were free. (See: BIND vs Jeeves, Stanford's Unix vs Berkeley's Unix, Minix vs Linux, Apache vs Microsoft/Netscape) At one point in all these product's lives they were lousier and smaller as compared to their competitors. But they won out because the low barrier to adoption (read:…

Thanks for pointing those out, I hadn't thought of them and can perhaps be accused of survivorship bias. I don't know about the first two examples but isn't Linux actually better than Minix and Apache certainly better than Microsoft? In any case, this is a bit of an unfair comparison because these are examples of open source vs proprietary, not product quality primarily. In the context of the OP's blog post, we are t…

> I don't know about the first two examples but isn't Linux actually better than Minix and Apache certainly better than Microsoft?

When they first started out, both were lousier, scrappy, free products.

> In any case, this is a bit of an unfair comparison because these are examples of open source vs proprietary, not product quality primarily.

There is nothing unfair about this comparison. Releasing free products and making money on other things has always been a viable way to compete against bigger, more established players. See: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html

Re: Why Free Plans Don’t Work

#115

Post by shadowsun7 »

shadowsun7 wrote: post #114
revorad wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing those out, I hadn't thought of them and can perhaps be accused of survivorship bias. I don't know about the first two examples but isn't Linux actually better than Minix and Apache certainly better than Microsoft? In any case, this is a bit of an unfair comparison because these are examples of open source vs proprietary, not product quality primarily. In the context of the OP's blog post, we are t…

> I don't know about the first two examples but isn't Linux actually better than Minix and Apache certainly better than Microsoft? When they first started out, both were lousier, scrappy, free products. > In any case, this is a bit of an unfair comparison because these are examples of open source vs proprietary, not product quality primarily. There is nothing unfair about this comparison. Releasing free products and…

Oops, I meant: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

Hope this helps.

Re: Why Free Plans Don’t Work

#116

Post by revorad »

shadowsun7 wrote: post #114
revorad wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing those out, I hadn't thought of them and can perhaps be accused of survivorship bias. I don't know about the first two examples but isn't Linux actually better than Minix and Apache certainly better than Microsoft? In any case, this is a bit of an unfair comparison because these are examples of open source vs proprietary, not product quality primarily. In the context of the OP's blog post, we are t…

> I don't know about the first two examples but isn't Linux actually better than Minix and Apache certainly better than Microsoft? When they first started out, both were lousier, scrappy, free products. > In any case, this is a bit of an unfair comparison because these are examples of open source vs proprietary, not product quality primarily. There is nothing unfair about this comparison. Releasing free products and…

But Linux wasn't started with that motive and I guess neither was Apache.

Re: Why Free Plans Don’t Work

#117

Post by Lozzer »

shadowsun7 wrote: post #114
revorad wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing those out, I hadn't thought of them and can perhaps be accused of survivorship bias. I don't know about the first two examples but isn't Linux actually better than Minix and Apache certainly better than Microsoft? In any case, this is a bit of an unfair comparison because these are examples of open source vs proprietary, not product quality primarily. In the context of the OP's blog post, we are t…

> I don't know about the first two examples but isn't Linux actually better than Minix and Apache certainly better than Microsoft? When they first started out, both were lousier, scrappy, free products. > In any case, this is a bit of an unfair comparison because these are examples of open source vs proprietary, not product quality primarily. There is nothing unfair about this comparison. Releasing free products and…

Was IIS even out there when the first version of Apache was released?

Re: Why Free Plans Don’t Work

#118

Post by xiongchiamiov »

shantanubala wrote: post #103
VBprogrammer wrote: post #68

I feel this really should have been titled "Why My Free Plan Didn’t Work." Since free plans have and will continue to work for some people. I don't know about you but I doubt GitHub would have taken off had it been exclusively pay-ware. Even if it did gain some traction someone would have made a free with upgrade option version of it.

The main thing with GitHub that makes it a great example of freemium is that they have two separate audiences for free and paid accounts. The free accounts are for open source projects and random hackers who write code for fun. By doing this, they attract talent and popularity to their service that convinces a different audience (businesses) to pay. GitHub probably still has many more free than paid users, but the up…

I would guess that there are a decent number of paid users who aren't "businesses", but just people.

I myself have a paid account because: 1. I want private repositories for school work and cba to set them up on my own server. 2. I run my website off of github, and only paid accounts get CNAME support. 3. I think they're awesome guys, and I want the service to stay around. This is the most important one.

Post reply on HN