Don't Offer a Free Plan

A free plan is OK as long as you understand that it's just a way of doing marketing. As with any marketing effort, you should keep the costs under control.

As with any marketing, it's easy to get it wrong. "Don't offer a free plan" is a good advice if there is a problem understanding the balance between revenue generation and expenses or there is a better way of doing marketing, but it's hardly a universal recommendation.

Free plans usually a good idea for a starting business when you look for approval from your target audience and stabilize the product. As companies grow, confirm product/market fit, polish the product, and discover more efficient ways of doing marketing, it's perfectly OK to discontinue the free plan.

What an odd article/website. While deciding against offering a free plan is a (reasonable) choice that is made by many SaaS products, it's obviously not a blanket thing everyone needs to follow. Free plans in SaaS products are to get people to evaluate/for marketing data and to hopefully ultimately lead free users to one of the paid plans (or drive some other revenue source, e.g. advertising). I think this is quite well known by now? Perhaps the author needs to capitalise more on what their business gets out of the free plan (e.g. marketing data), and work on converting that into to more paying customers.

The DO $5 vs $500 comparison is odd as well. Maybe you would be able to spend less support time per customer. But what DO offers is pretty much a commodity by now. If DO no longer offered anything under $500/month... well, it's not that hard to figure out what would happen.

The article goes on discuss alternatives, but while these solve some free-plan problems, these have other problems:

- trial periods means you will probably put people off sign up, because they are waiting for a 30 day period where they think they will have enough time to try it out

- free for FOSS/education/charity means you have to spend time deciding and justify who gets it and who doesn't

- lifetime try-out plan eliminates recurring revenue, which is kind of a big thing for SaaS products...

And then to top it off, at the bottom there is a link to the author's "Friendly Captcha" project, which alongside more paid plans with more features and limits, has... a free plan!

> Or somebody evaluating the options before deciding. Or somebody just making something the quickest way possible, leaving slow decisions for later...

This is exactly it. I've been both with and without purchasing authority.

WITH purchasing authority, at many organizations, I still need paperwork and approvals. To give an extreme example, try working for an EU government agency....

My patterns definitely fit the ones described. 95% of the time, I create an account, and nothing comes of it:

* I try five tools, and pick one.

* I try five tools, and pick zero.

* I do a weekend hackathon, and there is no business case

* I do a weekend hackathon, there is a business case, but yours isn't the right product

... etc.

But 5% of the time, there's a conversion, and with big orgs, quite often a big $$$ conversion. Those 95% cost you nearly nothing, or act as discovery (I rarely make a support call, but if I do make one, it's valuable to you).

As a footnote, in many industries, you give actual, physical products which cost $$$ for free (e.g. an IC) for this reason. Some of these do put up gateways to make sure I'm from a place which might go from 1 sample to buying 10,000 (or an ed institution). I don't think those are a good fit, but I do think it's possible (and not too difficult) to screen out abuse in most cases.

Fair point, although I wasn't referring to simply hoarding every data point you can get but specifically _using_ free users to improve your data set. Obviously this isn't a viable option for everyone.

Take a look at Google for a great example of this: Their "local guide" feature on Google Maps is using gamification to improve location data by convincing users to work for free; or Recaptcha using user input to train their machine learning models.

It really isn't/ shouldn't be.

In theory, the bank is really incentivized to provide proper and secure authentication (if someone can impersonate you to your bank, you're kinda screwed anyway). So, it only makes sense to trust a bank to provide the authentication service. One should realize that SSO integration with a bank doesn't mean 3rd party has any sort of access to the bank - it' just means that you authorize your bank to tell a 3rd party "yes, I believe this is really curryst"). Doesn't increase the attack surface for you - it only increases the "blast radius" if someone successfully compromises your bank account. But that one is typically already a dire situation.