171–180 of 232 posts
"No free plans" are prevalent in media subscriptions e.g. Netflix, Prime, AppleTV, Disney+ which offer free trials, but I'm struggling to think of any popular pure Software SaaS services that don't have a free plan?
Free trials don't create this dynamic of having skin in the game, most of the time people will forget they're on a free trial and aren't incentivized to give any feedback as to why they didn't convert. By them needing to reach out to get a refund things are much more aligned with your goal of understanding if you are delivering enough value or why not.
I think as you grow larger (or are VC backed/trying to capture market share), exploring a free plan is pretty important to help with that. But if you've grown to that point, having a free plan or not is likely the least of your worries.
Guys, this page is for indie hackers, mostly with B2B apps. You all give examples supporting free plans B2C products from well funded companies. Free plans are usually bad if you're a small B2B startup trying your way...even more so if you're bootstrapped. I also see that people disagreeing with this tactic are talking more about how they like it to be, not how it's best for the business.
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.…
To someone that you don't hate?
I ran Remarkbox for 5 years before deciding to make all plans free! https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....
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.…
How much do you cost the company by using the software for free? How much cost the thousands of users that use the product for free and don't recommend it to paying users?
Free plan doesn't have a one sided answer. Sometimes it is a good idea, sometimes it is not. Would Salesforce benefit from having a fee plan? This is not obvious to me
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 feel like free plans work best for products with a business/enterprise side: - where free users are an onramp for getting $x,xxx/mo-$xx,xxx/mo contracts with companies. - where many, many free users are subsidized every time a company signs up. Trello/Jira/Asana seem to fall pretty firmly into that territory. On the other hand, those running SaaS with fairly low per-month subscription value (e.g. $99-150/mo, as a l…
For me free plans work best for products that other products can be built on top of, because if I think I am going to build a product I want to have enough of a free tier that I can build the service and when I start having to pay for it I will have enough progress to know that it is worth investing money as well as time in it. Basically when I start paying for a service like that I want to have my product in release and at least a customer or two.
Of course I have only ever achieved this once.
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…