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Don't Offer a Free Plan

nofreeplan.com

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Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#121

Post by FalconSensei »

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.

For some things it could work. For something like Asana, Notion or Raindrop.io, I wouldn't invest time on it them...

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#122

Post by inopinatus »

viraptor wrote: post #110
inopinatus wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enti…

I read the "influencer" in original post as descriptive not prescriptive. > the companies in question evidently don't value information, and have instead relied on personal hubris Nothing in the post indicated hubris to me. "I have used this service before and can give you an estimation of how well it fits our usecase" is probably the best information about a service you can get. The alternative is to spend time and…

> Nothing in the post indicated hubris to me.

Claiming that you are personally responsible for Jira and Trello's marketing cut-through is sheer hubris.

And furthermore:

> The alternative is to spend time and money to discover that yourself

That's not an "alternative", that is simply professional consulting behaviour. Making the recommendation whilst declining to invest in the quality of that recommendation is hubris. And I'll double down by adding that "influencers" demanding freebies is downright obnoxious hubris. In the last few years, some segment of the tech community has normalized this behaviour as somehow acceptable and rational, but in practice it's as toxic as the article suggests.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#123

Post by protoduction »

encoderer wrote: post #88

Checks the guys saas... $4 plan. Hmm. This rounds to free. I wonder how he squares that. Anyway, my advice would be: depends on your unit economics.

It's just a landing page you are looking at for which I wanted to put down some numbers. The product [1] is very much pay-per-use (per e-mail sent), so the number shown here is more of a minimum monthly charge.

That said, I will probably double that number (and the included usage) prior to launching.

I expect there is a large difference in the quality of your users whether it's actually free or it's $4 per month.

[1]: https://magiclogin.net

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#124

Post by asiachick »

I am worried about github being free. I'd love it if they publish how much it cost them to offer all the free repos, free webpages, free ci, ... I can only imagine the growth rate accelerating over time to the point they'll need to stop the free tier or limit it in some way.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#125

Post by throw55 »

If you are an entrepreneur reading this, IGNORE the comments. They are written by people who form a very specific (and small) subset of the overall market and have very little overlap with the actual world at large.

If you plan to sell to the HN crowd (let's say development tools or something nearby) - by all means listen to their views. If you do not - ignore all the 'i want free stuff' and focus on people who are ready to pay for whatever you are making.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#126

Post by asiachick »

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.

Premier has a 30 day free trial. Not saying that's as good as a free tier, just saying you can try it and decide whether $240 a year is worth it.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#127

Post by easton »

kccqzy wrote: post #66
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.)

Or, alternatively, the 90 day fully featured free trial that you can renew by running the installer again. I'll buy it at some point, but for the one video I edit a year, $300 is pretty expensive to get the experience I had with iMovie '09.

https://www.apple.com/final-cut-pro/trial/

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#128

Post by IMTDb »

woofie11 wrote: post #86
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.…

My experience too. ALWAYS have a lifetime free plan. It's okay to make it a useless lifetime free plan (your data disappears every 2 weeks; you have a 3 email per day quota; etc.). It just need to be enough to seriously evaluate your product, and if it has APIs, to develop to them. There are sometimes good reasons to do more, and sometimes not. But that's the minimum. In the early days of AWS, I would build thing on…

Me experience is the exact opposite.

As a user:

- If I need the service and only intend to use it for a very small project, I love forever free plans. Because I know I can subscribe use your server time and forget my account forever. I often subscribe with a temp email so that I don't even receive your emails anymore.

- If I seriously need the service and is ready to pay for it, I don't really care about the free forever plan vs free trial vs paid trial.

As a business:

- Any time I have offered a free forever plan, basically 95% of the created accounts are dormant free accounts (like I personally am when I find the correct tool to scratch my itch). 4% are from people (usually from south east asia) creating hundreds/thousands of accounts (sometimes manually !) to circumvent the free plan limitations instead of just paying for the service. And 1% are from legitimate users/customers.

- People in the 95 and 4% categories still believe they are owed support. And if you don't give them an easy way to let them contact you, they now have twitter and facebook and business reviews websites to get to you. On top of emails, LinkedIn messages and yes, phone calls.

- Cutting the free accounts has almost no impact on real customers acquisition. You can let people experience your product with a temporary trial, that includes support and way more features, but behind the credit card screen. Extend the free trial as much as needed if people ask for it through your usual support channel. You will still get abusers but those are easier to detect, because they need to provide some payment details which are harder to fake, and after you shut them down for the third time in a row, they usually go away.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#129

Post by viraptor »

inopinatus wrote: post #122
viraptor wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the "influencer" in original post as descriptive not prescriptive. > the companies in question evidently don't value information, and have instead relied on personal hubris Nothing in the post indicated hubris to me. "I have used this service before and can give you an estimation of how well it fits our usecase" is probably the best information about a service you can get. The alternative is to spend time and…

> Nothing in the post indicated hubris to me. Claiming that you are personally responsible for Jira and Trello's marketing cut-through is sheer hubris. And furthermore: > The alternative is to spend time and money to discover that yourself That's not an "alternative", that is simply professional consulting behaviour. Making the recommendation whilst declining to invest in the quality of that recommendation is hubris.…

Noticing that due to time/money constraints familiar tech with a free testing plan gets better chances of accepting is not the same as demanding freebies. If you have time and money to do a full review of every alternative available, go for it - don't forget to add training / new tech implementation to the budget. If you're in a "we need something that we know can do X now" position, you'll likely get a recommendation from people experienced with X.

I've also got a number of solutions that just solve the problem at reasonable price. My recommendation in those categories will be "X can do it; have you got specific requirements that X doesn't match? if not, I can implement it with X and we can review that in months/years".

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#130

Post by dwild »

IMTDb wrote: post #128
woofie11 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience too. ALWAYS have a lifetime free plan. It's okay to make it a useless lifetime free plan (your data disappears every 2 weeks; you have a 3 email per day quota; etc.). It just need to be enough to seriously evaluate your product, and if it has APIs, to develop to them. There are sometimes good reasons to do more, and sometimes not. But that's the minimum. In the early days of AWS, I would build thing on…

Me experience is the exact opposite. As a user: - If I need the service and only intend to use it for a very small project, I love forever free plans. Because I know I can subscribe use your server time and forget my account forever. I often subscribe with a temp email so that I don't even receive your emails anymore. - If I seriously need the service and is ready to pay for it, I don't really care about the free for…

> Any time I have offered a free forever plan, basically 95% of the created accounts are dormant free accounts (like I personally am when I find the correct tool to scratch my itch).

What's the issue? Unused account shouldn't be a big spending. If it become one, take a bit of time to change it a bit (delete data/stop service after a set amount of inactivity) and use that occasion to send them an email that remind them that your service exist.

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