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Don't Offer a Free Plan

nofreeplan.com

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61–70 of 232 posts

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#61

Post by jahewson »

alpaca128 wrote: post #15

One concept I like is the Premium plan that gives lifetime access to all features but only updates for one year. It can act as both the old-school software purchase or subscription depending on what the user prefers.

I don’t think this model aligns the incentives particularly well. If a business does a great job creating a piece of long-lived reliable software, they get punished by infrequent updates. If they ship a good-but-not-great product with some lock-in, need for frequent updates and an ecosystem of backwards-incompatible plugins and formats, then they get rewarded because you’ll end up buying it again next year.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#62

Post by namrog84 »

ben509 wrote: post #43
jonpurdy wrote: post #13

Anecdata: Trello and Jira both have free plans that I used that caused me to recommend them for paid usage at multiple companies I’ve worked with. Those free plans resulted in $xx-$xxxx monthly subscriptions. Asana has a paid plan with a 5-user minimum limit. I never bothered to even try it since I wouldn’t have the extended time to play with it. As a result it never even got mentioned to companies I’ve worked with.…

I think trials can be improved for services where you can discern whether the user is directly interacting with it. You give them 100 days of usage, and then decrement a counter when they interact with the site the first time each day.

BeyondCompare does this and I've been slowing decrementing my 30 day usage trial for almost a year. I'm likely going to buy when it gets near zero but I use it so infrequently it just hasn't caused justification to purchase. But if it wasn't for this extended usage decrement counter id have likely just gone with something else after 30 day trial of using it but 1 day

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#64

Post by gnicholas »

I recently had to add a freemium tier to my Chrome extension, on account of Google getting rid of their built-in payments platform.

I have been surprised to see how many new users we have picked up in just the first few days since this change went into effect. We had fewer than 500 users (all paid) from over 5 years of being in the store. In the last two weeks, we've picked up another 500. Granted, most of the new users are not paid, but some percent are converting to the paid subscription.

Because this is a Chrome extension, there are no server costs. There are some purchase-related customer service inquiries, but these are mostly due to glitches in our new purchasing system, which will presumably go away over time. We've had no questions so far that are unrelated to purchasing (i.e., from unpaid users).

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#65

Post by dempseye »

mmaunder wrote: post #10

It is sad but true that users that pay less, or zero, are more demanding on customer support and make unreasonable demands via social. Had a guy this week using our free product that has 90% of the paid products features berating us on Twitter for not being 100% free and demanding we convert and rely on donations to support our 40 person team. Makes me regret having a free offering. In my 20 years doing software star…

Disable his account.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#66

Post by kccqzy »

prawn wrote: post #32

A lot of what I use (including as a paying user), I use because I was able to start on a free tier and then upgrade as my needs grew. DaVinci Resolve, Sublime Text, GSuite, WeTransfer, Dropbox, iCloud, Sequel Pro, etc. I didn't try Premier, Final Cut, various text editors or paid-only cloud services.

Strange that you mention Final Cut. It's clear to me that the free, limited edition of Final Cut already exists by the name of iMovie.

(This was after Final Cut Pro X, not 7.)

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#67

Post by grogenaut »

namrog84 wrote: post #62
ben509 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think trials can be improved for services where you can discern whether the user is directly interacting with it. You give them 100 days of usage, and then decrement a counter when they interact with the site the first time each day.

BeyondCompare does this and I've been slowing decrementing my 30 day usage trial for almost a year. I'm likely going to buy when it gets near zero but I use it so infrequently it just hasn't caused justification to purchase. But if it wasn't for this extended usage decrement counter id have likely just gone with something else after 30 day trial of using it but 1 day

Used beyond compare heavily at a previous company... when I got to amazon I immediately expensed it. I use it about 30-50 times a year but it's definitely worth a buck each time I need it.

(edit, removed indefinite pronoun)

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#68

Post by 0xTJ »

I'm much more willing to shell out for a perpetual license for software than a subscription. I use Directory Opus 12 Pro but I don't have a decent PDF tool.

Even better if it's an open-source tool that I'm paying for.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#69

Post by iujjkfjdkkdkf »

Worth noting from the end of the article:

> If you're curious about my SaaS projects, the first is Friendly Captcha, a privacy and user-friendly alternative captcha. Friendly Captcha does actually have a forever-free plan, mostly because it also has the social mission of fighting ReCAPTCHA's dominance

I have not looked at the author's product yet but I'm very supportive of anything that replaces re-captcha. Not only is it offensive to be asked to perform those tasks for Google, it is effectively a way for them to punish people who don't allow Google to track them. Re-captcha is google exercising monopoly power in the worst way. I routinely abandon transactions that ask me to solve a re-captcha for them. It's very nice to see alternatives.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#70

Post by john_moscow »

mmaunder wrote: post #10

It is sad but true that users that pay less, or zero, are more demanding on customer support and make unreasonable demands via social. Had a guy this week using our free product that has 90% of the paid products features berating us on Twitter for not being 100% free and demanding we convert and rely on donations to support our 40 person team. Makes me regret having a free offering. In my 20 years doing software star…

>Had a guy this week using our free product that has 90% of the paid products features berating us on Twitter for not being 100% free and demanding we convert and rely on donations to support our 40 person team.

If there's any consolation, people like this have near zero impact on the actual sales. Reasonable customers who research reviews are used to filtering out nutty feedback. So all you get is megabytes of virtual outrage from people that would have never bought your product in the first place.

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