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

Don't Offer a Free Plan

nofreeplan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 232 posts

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#161

Post by derefr »

mjevans wrote: post #153
derefr wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you feel about a free-forever plan behind a credit card screen? Google Cloud is this way: stay below their free usage limits for some services and you'll never need to pay; but you need to give them your card up-front because it's a post-paid service and they need to ensure they can charge you if-and-when you do go over those limits. Or, for another approach: how about a plan that's free, but where there's a s…

What's your use case for the "one time fee"? Is this a barrier to prevent bad actors? I can easily see use cases where someone without buying power can get a 50, maybe even 100 USD bond or 'license' of some sort PROVIDED that there's either only one or even more ideally a set of competitors who's "not a bad actor" licenses are interoperable; and work on the whole Internet for that task (without expiring until bad kar…

The one-time fee is an e-stamp, basically. It makes having N identities N times as expensive as having one. It's one of the oldest anti-spam suggestions, from before spam filters were invented.

What you're talking about with that "license" is exactly what you get by everybody relying on a small set of KYC providers; except that the KYC provider doesn't charge you for registration, but instead requires a Proof-of-Stake in some state's legal system (i.e. a set of documents that require laborious up-front proofs to acquire, such that it's very hard to acquire two sets of them, but which can be used to validate identity freely once issued.)

KYC providers that just charge $100 instead of requiring a Proof-of-Stake challenge exist, too. That's essentially the (secondary?) purpose of businesses that will only trade with other incorporated businesses (or, to abstract that away, only with businesses that have a Dun & Bradstreet DUNS number): it costs $100 to incorporate, or to register one of those numbers, so you have to be at least $100 of serious to bother them, and you can't just keep spending hundred-dollar-bills forever to keep generating new identities to DDoS someone.

What I haven't heard of, interestingly, is a KYC provider that requires a proof of work. Something like "solve a thousand Captchas to create an account." Or a formalized version of the old "take a photo of yourself holding up today's newspaper." But that'd be totally workable as well.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#162

Post by curryst »

derefr wrote: post #156
brewdad wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might work in a B2B relationship but as an individual, there is no site on earth that is getting me to give you my bank account or driver's license info as part of a "free" or "trial" plan. Maybe. MAYBE. I'll give you a credit card number since I know I can always dispute/chargeback if you turn out to be dishonest. No way do you get anything that can't be 100% undone within a few minutes.

> give you my bank account or driver's license info as part of a "free" or "trial" plan. Re: bank accounts, nobody was suggesting that, that's not how KYC systems work. Re: driver's license info, that's not quite how (well-implemented, modern) KYC flows work, either. For "signing up using your bank", I wasn't talking about giving the service a photo of a void cheque or anything; I was talking about doing Single Sign-…

I'm not familiar enough with SSO flows to be able to quantify any kind of risk, but it makes me very uneasy when things interconnect with my bank. Everything always seems secure until it isn't.

I don't mean to spread FUD, it just seems needlessly risky to make banks the central point of auth.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#163

Post by mgadams3 »

jitl wrote: post #117

At Notion, we used to have a limited free plan where we only allowed users to create 1000 blocks (pages/paragraphs/embeds/checkboxes/database rows) before we directed them to upgrade to the "Personal Pro" plan. Supporting free users dealing with the block limit was a major headache, just as described in the OP, but more importantly the Personal Pro plan was kind of a dead end - few users converted to Pro, and those t…

Great stuff Jake, thanks for sharing. I watched that pricing change very closely as we have a similar progression from solo to multi-player at [https://grain.co/pricing] but very helpful to hear the reasoning behind it.

Completely agreed that the nuance is critical to this discussion and the absolutism makes the great clickbait but isn't supported by reality.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#164

Post by keithnz »

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 anecdotal experience is similar, there's quite a few products we use because we started with the free plan, and now pay for the product. One of the big problems over the last few years is we have ended up with a LOT of useless subscriptions (often cheap ones) sitting there doing nothing for a long time, so it gets tricky, people want to have conversations about what we will be getting out of a new subscription to a product before we have started to use it in any meaningful way ( there's a lot we try out and abandon ), even when cheap, the ones we integrate, its a no brainer paying for or bumping up to the next tier as we use it more.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#166

Post by raghuveerdotnet »

When it comes to B2C, prescriptions don't apply uniformly, or for that matter scale. Beware.

My only suggestion would be that be honest with the value proposition of your product. Know that your electron-based note-taking tool is not the same as the entire g-suite or ms office.

And finally, remember that no one is more emotionally invested in your product than you are. So let the suggestions trade.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#167

Post by dt3ft »

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 used to offer a free plan on https://pdf2qrcode.com but not anymore since it costs to have free users and I did not see any conversions into a paid plan. Replaced with a 60 day free trial and it gets the job done.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#168

Post by start123 »

I recently shut down my free plan and instead introduced Trial on paid plans. Brought in a new entry level plan that is far cheaper https://blanq.io/pricing.html to make the transition easier.

As an indiehacker, the free plan allowed me to iron out bugs and improve the overall experience of the platform. But the amount of effort it took to maintain the free plan was enormous so, I shut it down. I informed users about the decision and, I am glad few converted to being paid customers.

I have a lot of free time now and I can focus on delivering value to my customers. The server load also reduced due to reduction of free requests and database writes/reads.

For a large SAAS company like Slack, Trello etc, it makes sense to have a free plan since you have a lot of resources at your disposal but, if you are a small team or worse alone, then no.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#169

Post by JackPoach »

I think the most important question is who created this page and if they have any kind of success with their SaaS in a way Bitrix24, Slack, Trello, Notion or Miro do, which all have lifetime free plans and millions of users.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#170

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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.…

Jira is one of those products, but an even bigger one (I think?) that I've seen in multiple places is Slack. I don't know if my experience is universal, but in multiple workplaces I've been at, people started using Slack (the free plan) as a grassroots / from the trenches / heck trying to get corporate approval movement; they just started using it and it spread among people, until at some point it gained critical mass, the limits became annoying, and they finally get leadership buy-in.
Post reply on HN