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If I were a legislator, I would introduce a bill to ban footnotes in advertising. Everything that the company feels it needs to print, must be included in the main ad copy. Enough with this coy duplicity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They should at least grandfathered any users on the -free forever- plan
Agreed. Does anyone have any insight as to why companies fail to do this? Naively as a non-{marketing,business development,COO} guy, I feel like the cost to keep delivering those services ought to pale in comparison to the value of having even a tiny number of those customers go into a forum like HN or Reddit and say "we've been there since the early days and we're really happy". Sure, it's inherently a tech/financia…
It’s really hard to quantify the positive benefit of letting them stay, and really easy to quantify that letting them stay is going to cost us $500/month forever.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They should at least grandfathered any users on the -free forever- plan
Agreed. Does anyone have any insight as to why companies fail to do this? Naively as a non-{marketing,business development,COO} guy, I feel like the cost to keep delivering those services ought to pale in comparison to the value of having even a tiny number of those customers go into a forum like HN or Reddit and say "we've been there since the early days and we're really happy". Sure, it's inherently a tech/financia…
The reasoning breaks down here. There's not likely to be a lot of attrition for a free product compared to a paid one. It costs nothing to continue and costs time to cancel.
Is there ground for legal action, particularly if you depended on this? It seems like a contract of sorts, and if any of their sales people ever assured anyone it was "free forever" I think that becomes a verbal contact.
There's no consideration though.
Consideration doesn't have to be financial.
I am not sure why anyone is surprised or this should even be news. I don’t have a speck of business education and I can see this is no way sustainable. “Free forever” is not a sound business strategy (shock emoji). If it is free, like Youtube, Reddit, Zulip, than expects them to profit in some other way. If you can’t explain how a business profit you shouldn’t use it because: 1. Its not going to last. 2. They are doi…
This is good advice. I don't understand how venmo floats, and it has been a long while so...
This is an ad for Zulip
If I were a legislator, I would introduce a bill to ban footnotes in advertising. Everything that the company feels it needs to print, must be included in the main ad copy. Enough with this coy duplicity.
I agree with the sentiments but I don't know if that's feasible
IMHO, it would level the playing field for honest manufacturers and service providers.
Sure, it would effectively outlaw many types of ads that we see today, but do you think any of the types of ads that rely on hidden fine print are really all that valuable to our economy or society?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no consideration though.
There is. The goal of the "free forever" is to (1) exposure / publicity (2) lock-in (3) ecosystem / API integrations (4) eyeballs (5) customer counts for investor decks (6) etc. Consideration doesn't have to be financial.
These things happen, and have value, but I wouldn't have considered them as "given as a quid pro quo" or "mutual promises".
I 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…
I'm pretty skeptical of this approach. There are generally two reasons to offer free tiers: 1- hope users will upgrade to paid plans 2- hope free users will spread name recognition through word of mouth to people who will pay Generally speaking, "free tier" users are the worst- they demand more from support and expect to give nothing in return. Very few transition to paid users. What happens if you give your free tie…
1) I am at a megacorp. I want to rapidly prototype without going through purchasing / finance / bureaucracy.
2) I have a personal and a work account. I learn something on weekends on the free tier and use it at work.
Both of those have happened (with me, as the user), and led to millions of dollar of business to cloud vendors. In the case of #2, the cloud vendor has no way of knowing that the conversion came from a free tier. In the case of #1, I'm not even sure they tracked it.
I am astronomically less likely to use tools without a free tier, at the very least at the level of validating that the product is useful, and ideally, at enough of a level to get started.
The AWS free tier is almost exactly the right level, but would do better without expiration. It's not costly or usable to build anything significant in the free tier, but more than enough to get started. The one-year limit is an issue, since when I switched jobs, it was no longer usable.
Other scenarios I've seen:
- Early-stage startups. It's dirt cheap to offer free tier to someone with O(0) users, and most stay there. Those that hit the exponential growth curve more than make up for it, and won't have capacity to migrate. AWS courts these hard.
- Education. What people learn in school, they take to their jobs. Especially engineering software companies make hard plays here.