80 percent of revenue comes from 20 percent of users. Rest 80 percent of users include those free plan users.
Don't Offer a Free Plan
221–230 of 232 posts
Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan
#222Gotta love black and white advice like this in a gray world
We just added a free for life plan to ZenMaid.com after a lot of thought and effort
Time will tell if it's right for but there's no way that it's a simple across the board as "Don't offer a free plan"
Did get some good ideas from the article though, thanks for sharing OP
For anyone interested I wrote in depth about our decision on my notion here:
https://www.notion.so/ZenMaid-Should-Launch-a-Free-Plan-1b81...
Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan
#223One problem that I see with SaaS vendors (and I am working on my own SaaS), is that some of them are delirious with their pricings, in my humble opinion. For example Duolingo. Love Duolingo. My kids use it. So we want to support them, but that means paying 120 euros per year per kid (240 euros!), so we use the free option. If they had a plan that was, I don't know, 1 euro per person per month, we will gladly pay 4 eu…
> If they had a plan that was, I don't know, 1 euro per person per month If you're building your own SaaS you will quickly realize it's very difficult to build a sustainable business if you only charge 1 euro/month. I just looked up the price of Duolingo [0]. It looks like it's only ~6 euros/month not 10, but think about the difference in revenue between 6 euros and 1 euro. You need 6x as many customers at 1 euro/mon…
I am not saying it is easy to make money. But the jump from free to next tier is too high for what it brings, basically nothing in the case of duolingo (no adds and for kids unlimited "lives"), and I use the same resources, only difference is that I am shown adds.
I don't know what kind of analysis they did, but you can have 90% of your uses using your resources paying 0 euros per month, or you can try to have 50% of your users paying 1 euro per month.
About the cost, I would gladly pay 60 euros a year for a family pack (4 people). You can even offer the Lite Family Pack for 60 euros and adds, and full family pack for 120 euros and no adds. Or something like that.
But a family of four is 288 euros per year. That is a lot of money because it is not the only thing you pay, you pay duolingo, netflix, amazon prime, office 365, etc., and in some countries it is absolutely prohibitive.
I mean, I would understand the pricing if they didn't have the free tier, but if you have it why that big jump in cost?
And I am not saying it is not the same scale or anything, but in the beginning Whatsapp charged you 1 euro per YEAR! I know as I paid at least two years.
It is a known fact that "consumers build internal reference prices in time through exposure to different prices. When they see a new price tag, they compare it to the reference price and form an opinion".
If Office 365 or Google Suite can give so much value for 5 to 10 euros a month, it is hard to (at least mentally) justify paying that much for products that do less. And yes, I understand it is a perception thing.
Another option is "free for non-commercial use" (teamviewr or irfanview for example) or "free if you make less than this much a year" (unity I think?). You can then have to different steps of payment, like free, basic, basic plus, premium, etc).
Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> However, those free users were poised to recommend Dropbox when their companies were looking for a file storage and sharing solution. 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.
I don’t think I’ve ever sent a Dropbox link and have received few enough to count on both hands. Dropbox for me always seemed like a polished file sync solution with associated/inadvertent offsite backup that later bolted on a not-quite-polished file share function.
Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan
#225Gotta love black and white advice like this in a gray world We just added a free for life plan to ZenMaid.com after a lot of thought and effort Time will tell if it's right for but there's no way that it's a simple across the board as "Don't offer a free plan" Did get some good ideas from the article though, thanks for sharing OP For anyone interested I wrote in depth about our decision on my notion here: https://www…
Hey, unrelated, but you might want to check how your home page's moving headline behaves on different window sizes. For me at about 850px and 1470px, the words that change at the start of the headline cause the content below to pop up and down every few seconds (FF on Win).
Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article says, "Counter-intuitively, the less the user pays the more likely they are to need your help", but that's not so counter-intuitive if you invert it. Cheap users tend to be inexpert users. Expert users who really value your offering enough to pay more are those who understand why it's worth the money. They likely understand the problem or use that your work addresses, and they have enough knowledge to kno…
Oddly, shellac is both a desert topping—it's sometimes used to make chocolates shiny—and a floor wax. Sorry for the tangent, I had to look this up, and was surprised.
I mean, it's also bug squeezins
Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also once you deal with medium to large companies they will have an internal support team solve a lot of minor issues before it ever gets escalated to you.
Apart from those (I could name some medium and large financial services companies the following supplies to, but won't for obvious reasons) who officially have their own first-line support (and even try demand a per seat discount on that basis) but that support is useless: their idea of providing support is simply forwarding emails to us, no triage, no collation, no digging for extra information. Heck, sometimes they…
Expertise and company size aren't related, though, and I didn't mention it. There are ranges of expertise across large and small companies. Above a certain size, businesses are subject to the pathologies of the corporate world and can become real stinkers despite having money and (possibly sidelined) expertise.
Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan
#228Gotta love black and white advice like this in a gray world We just added a free for life plan to ZenMaid.com after a lot of thought and effort Time will tell if it's right for but there's no way that it's a simple across the board as "Don't offer a free plan" Did get some good ideas from the article though, thanks for sharing OP For anyone interested I wrote in depth about our decision on my notion here: https://www…
Hey, unrelated, but you might want to check how your home page's moving headline behaves on different window sizes. For me at about 850px and 1470px, the words that change at the start of the headline cause the content below to pop up and down every few seconds (FF on Win).
Thanks Caspar, will have the team take a look :-)
Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
With just the information you've given, there's no way you can conclude with certainty that the price is too high. The real question is, how targeted is the email list towards a japanese language course offering, and what is the open rate on the email list. If everybody on the list is interested in learning japanese, AND, the email list has good open rates, that MIGHT mean her pricing is too high. Or not. That said,…
Well, I looked into her courses (and I, though not a beginner, already tried more than 20 apps out there so I know what a $300 or $9 content should look like), and plenty of people on her social media commented that it is way too expensive... Going by your logic, why doesn't she increase the price to $30000?
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Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
This supports the parent post and does not refute it. Although you may have been unsatisfied with iMovie, it is in fact the free tier of Final Cut Pro, much as GarageBand is the free tier of Logic. Interestingly enough, iMovie and GarageBand even have iPhone and iPad versions (though sadly there's no iPadOS version of FCP/Logic yet.) Though Final Cut Pro and Logic do run amazingly well on an M1 Mac mini.
> Although you may have been unsatisfied with iMovie, it is in fact the free tier of Final Cut Pro, much as GarageBand is the free tier of Logic. Are they though? I think of a free version as having the same interface and core functionality with locked features. Does iMovie have the same interface/menus/workflow as Final Cut now? These seem more like the "let's not dilute the product by repackaging some of the codeba…
> Does iMovie have the same interface/menus/workflow as Final Cut now?
As I understand it, it was Final Cut Pro X that changed to be closer to iMovie; this was criticized at the time as Apple removed several features that had been in Final Cut Pro 7.