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If you don’t offer a free plan because it’s too expensive, but blow $$$ on social media and web advertising, you’re probably doing it backwards.
For example, why does anyone know or care about GitHub? Because it’s free.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article specifically mentions free trial periods as being a good idea.
Different anecdata here. Trial periods suck. My experience is that I rarely have enough time to determine if I really like the service or if it's still just a shiny new tool to play with. I need more than 14-30 days to actually put in the work to understand a reasonably complex tool (say a CRM system) well enough to make a commercial recommendation. Obviously this issue doesn't apply to all SaaS companies but it's pr…
As a counter, I think free plans are the way forward. ProfitWell, Canva, Mailchimp, etc are all leaders. Freemium is how you win. I broke down my thought process here: https://www.chrisfrantz.com/how-to-kill-a-unicorn/
The intent was to say in a convoluted way: focus on those that value your business, and in particular focus on paying customers (the higher the better). In general it's better to have fewer customers that pay more and pamper them.
If you have millions of users the story is very different of course.
Most MBA programs go over why you don’t want a small number of high paying clients. It’s the opposite of diversification and is a risk factor. In the situation they claim as bad losing 1 clients means losing 10% of your revenue!
Still it’s easier to support 10 users than a 100. Product may be simpler because of it.
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…
I view articles like this as if I'm watching a high school debate team competition where the author is forced to argue a side while ignoring the positives of the other side. Fun for seeing emphasizing different perspective, not so great for giving a balanced view. > In some cases, sure, a free plan is going to cost more in effort than it pays in users who convert to paid Definitely. This is the most common mistake I…
You can take the Dropbox example further though. The free plan was absolutely necessary for Dropbox. If you're in the file sharing business, it's only going to work if all users are using Dropbox.
We took a hard look at that free personal plan and how it worked with our goals. Instead of phasing it out, we decided to make it unlimited - now personal users can make as many blocks as they want [https://www.notion.so/personal]. But importantly, we also switched up our segmentation at the same time: we restricted the personal plans' collaboration model and created a new "Team Trial" plan, with the same 1000 block limit, but with all the teamwork features included. Another thing to note about our Team Trail is that it's not time-limited at all, teams can keep trialing Notion until it has clear value to them. We have many fewer users frustrated by the block limit, but those who are are much more valuable, and are getting a lot more out of Notion -- when they upgrade, it's to a Team plan with strong network effects and a path to future expansion.
And all those (now) very happy users on the free plan? They're like jonpurdy [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26059666] - they'll take Notion into their (future) teams and workplaces, even though in the shorter term they're a strain on our systems.
My advice is - there's more nuance to this than "MAKE IT FREE" vs "DON'T MAKE IT FREE". Think about how you structure upgrade incentives around value, and about how your free plans fit into your overall market strategy.
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.