When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
blog.zulip.com
When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
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Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#2This blog post is from the "never let a competitor's mistake go unnoticed" school of thought.
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#3All because they took VC money and now they are under pressure to start acting like a business and ‘make money’ instead of burning it for so-called ‘free forever’ deals that age like milk.
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#4For the love of God, just use Zulip :)
It’s how we stay sane.
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#5This blog post is from the "never let a competitor's mistake go unnoticed" school of thought.
Not sure I totally agree. Capitalizing on a competitors mistake is kind of slimy; calling out their poor business practices is not.
Users will invest their time and resources into using your product based on the promise that it’s free forever. Changing your mind later puts the burden on them to figure out how to move forward.
Even if I was a free user and I was considering a paid plan that type of dishonesty would make me move to a competitor. What else will they change their mind on? No thanks.
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#6This blog post is from the "never let a competitor's mistake go unnoticed" school of thought.
Not sure I totally agree. Capitalizing on a competitors mistake is kind of slimy; calling out their poor business practices is not. Users will invest their time and resources into using your product based on the promise that it’s free forever. Changing your mind later puts the burden on them to figure out how to move forward. Even if I was a free user and I was considering a paid plan that type of dishonesty would ma…
They should at least grandfathered any users on the -free forever- plan
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#7All because they took VC money and now they are under pressure to start acting like a business and ‘make money’ instead of burning it for so-called ‘free forever’ deals that age like milk.
Not everyone is lucky enough to liberate a fully-developed product from Dropbox and not have to pay them back.
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#8All because they took VC money and now they are under pressure to start acting like a business and ‘make money’ instead of burning it for so-called ‘free forever’ deals that age like milk.
I agree.
Random thought but > that age like milk.
Isn't aged milk cheese?
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#9This blog post is from the "never let a competitor's mistake go unnoticed" school of thought.
Not sure I totally agree. Capitalizing on a competitors mistake is kind of slimy; calling out their poor business practices is not. Users will invest their time and resources into using your product based on the promise that it’s free forever. Changing your mind later puts the burden on them to figure out how to move forward. Even if I was a free user and I was considering a paid plan that type of dishonesty would ma…
> Not sure I totally agree. Capitalizing on a competitors mistake is kind of slimy; calling out their poor business practices is not.
Which part of what I wrote didn't you agree with?
Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
#10I wonder if they ever compared the price of AWS hosting and just renting a rack at a colocation facility.
One way of thinking about this is that "free" isn't "enterprise" and while you would love to have them convert, hosting free users on a rack with a 500MB Cogent IP transport contract can be had for < $2K/month. So $24K a year. Is it a "teir-1" data center? no. Does it have failure redundancy? no. Is there a risk of data loss in the event of a power failure? yes. But all of those things are what drive the costs up and are what make the "paid" plan, worth more than the "free" plan. Would it be good enough for people? Absolutely.