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Don't Offer a Free Plan

nofreeplan.com

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Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#91

Post by steve_adams_86 »

ChrisRR wrote: post #2

Additionally I remember reading a comment on here that boiled down to: If you offer a free service, it'll be used to host spam, porn or other illegal activity

This is true for paid services too. My team is working to offer a service which allows people to create a feed of images, and we’re all fairly worried about what we’re going to see uploaded.

We’ve all worked on social websites (including Facebook) and we’ve all seen what users are capable of uploading.

One of our internal initiatives is improving our ability to find this stuff and remove it without having to actually engage and look at it regularly. Ugh. Offering any kind of storage at all, free or paid, comes with some risks.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#92

Post by xwdv »

This works, until it doesn't.

If your free plan is killing you you're structuring it wrong. Free users shouldn't get support, that's reserved for paying customers. A free user should basically have to just read documentation. And if there's premium features with expensive hosting costs that aren't trivial to subsidize, then that is not a free feature.

You also lose a lot of market share when your competitor starts offering a free plan.

Have a free plan, but never think of it as more than a lead generator.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#93

Post by chillfox »

cratermoon wrote: post #45
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…

The article says, "Counter-intuitively, the less the user pays the more likely they are to need your help", but that's not so counter-intuitive if you invert it. Cheap users tend to be inexpert users. Expert users who really value your offering enough to pay more are those who understand why it's worth the money. They likely understand the problem or use that your work addresses, and they have enough knowledge to kno…

Also once you deal with medium to large companies they will have an internal support team solve a lot of minor issues before it ever gets escalated to you.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#94

Post by btinker »

scrollaway wrote: post #5

Since this headline is likely to have a decent amount of people reading comments and not the article, I just want to highlight their suggestion of a "lifetime try-out plan". It's a pretty original thought, I don't think I've ever seen a SaaS use that. I have seen trial plans with a small $ attached before though.

Though combining a paid "lifetime" plan with the deactivation of inactive accounts as the article suggests seems like a bad idea. That's deceptive in my book.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#95

Post by ashdev »

I agree with the author to some extent.

If you're a B2B startup then it definitely makes sense. For B2C it can be a bit tricky to determine because you want to know if your users find your product useful and the quickest way to get your product in the hands of many users/potential customers is to offer the product for free(with some restrictions).

Especially for indie developers like me, we need to get validation and feedback on the product as quickly as possible, and free plan allows us to get that quickly.

Once you gain some traction then it makes sense to not have a free plan to filter out free users, but in initial stage I wouldn't shy away from free plan personally.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#96

Post by mproud »

awillen wrote: post #72

This is really aggressively oversimplifying a complicated problem that exists across a huge number of different types of software. In some cases, sure, a free plan is going to cost more in effort than it pays in users who convert to paid. That said, the objection that free users are going to take up too much time is pretty easily solved... look at Google, which has zero customer support and an enormous number of free…

Agreed. Sometimes adoption is just as important as making money.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#98

Post by drusepth »

I think this advice works well for established markets where users know what to expect with a product ("Netflix but X", "JIRA for Y", etc)

For people building Thiel-esque "zero to one" SaaS products, I've found free plans absolutely invaluable in educating users on what your product can do and why they might want it. In my experience, offering a free plan lowered an otherwise-high barrier of entry and helps those users then build a habit (incorporating your product into their workflow/dailies) that converts comparably to hiring salespeople.

There are indeed a lot of unintended/hidden costs to having a free plan, but there are a lot of costs to selling a paid-only product, too. Seems like every product should gauge what's best for their use/market. :)

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#99

Post by inopinatus »

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.…

The examples of Trello and Jira are specifically problematic, because their history says otherwise: Jira built its considerable market share and brand awareness without a free plan of any kind, offering instead just a short-term trial license; I remember just a few years ago that the price of admission was thousands of dollars per server, and yet here it is. And Trello comes from the other direction, having been entirely free of charge at launch and only latterly monetizing.

The broader problem with this example is that the companies in question evidently don't value information, and have instead relied on personal hubris, which speaking as a longtime service provider is itself a red flag for "problem customer", and if not quite the horrors depicted in the article then certainly on that spectrum.

All of which illustrates that talking to anyone who self-describes as an "influencer" is generally a net negative, unless you're in the FMCG category. Influencers demanding freebies is something to be abhorred, and there is no equivalence here to seeking high quality professional advice.

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