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When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”

blog.zulip.com

111–120 of 267 posts

Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”

#111
post #77
post #73

If a company gets rid of my free forever plan with them, there is a 0% chance that they're getting any money or positive word of mouth from me in the future. It's incredibly scummy behavior. If you're not willing to actually offer it forever, just call it a free plan instead of lying about it.

Not trying to be funny, but if you're on a 'free forever' plan and happy with it there's already a close-to-0% chance they'll get any money off you...

Then why offer it to begin with? Presumably a company does so because there's some form of value for them.

Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”

#112
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, I don't think that's right. I can name other scenarios: 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 ve…

All good points, but I'll add that "free trial" is a very good hook, "free forever" is not.

So offering free trial periods (like AWS do for a year) is very effective, and very measurable.

Free Forever is clearly not self-sustaining, do one of us will inevitably be disappointed eventually, and i suspect that'll start by being you and end up being me.

Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”

#113
post #93
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you’ve never made a mistake in your future predictions? youve never committed to something you couldnt deliver? i understand the outrage but remember the people on the other side of that screen are just humans too. many things dont turn out the way the initial intention was (im not excusing this specific instance, im just hoping for less vitriol when i someday make some over promising mistake in future). let he who i…

"Forever" is such a word which you should nit utter lightly, especially in the context of a service commitment. I see that mistakes are made, and they need to be fixed when they become obvious (usually other people have to fix them than the people who made them). But there's no expectation that making and fixing such a mistake should be free , without impact on reputation and customers' goodwill.

Agree. Absolutely NEVER say 'never.'

Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”

#114
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you’ve never made a mistake in your future predictions? youve never committed to something you couldnt deliver? i understand the outrage but remember the people on the other side of that screen are just humans too. many things dont turn out the way the initial intention was (im not excusing this specific instance, im just hoping for less vitriol when i someday make some over promising mistake in future). let he who i…

Actions always have consequences. If your bad decisions aren't affecting you, they're affecting other people. You want absolution for your mistakes, go to Confession. For the rest of us, back pressure is what makes our giant distributed system called Civilization work.

Brilliant!

Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”

#115
post #103
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you’ve never made a mistake in your future predictions? youve never committed to something you couldnt deliver? i understand the outrage but remember the people on the other side of that screen are just humans too. many things dont turn out the way the initial intention was (im not excusing this specific instance, im just hoping for less vitriol when i someday make some over promising mistake in future). let he who i…

It should be illegal to offer 'free forever' plans and tiers. No company is actually capable of delivering on that promise. It's not a mistake if its blatantly obvious at the beginning that your company is unlikely to last forever.

> It should be illegal to offer 'free forever' plans and tiers. No company is actually capable of delivering on that promise.

It is perfectly possible if your marginal cost is low/zero. The value of a product has nothing to do with its cost. The paying customers on higher tiers will easily subsidise the free for life plans.

If you have no paying customers, well, then your product is at the end of its life anyway.

I, for example, am a paying customer of JetBrains tools and all I get is to be able to download updates. It would probably cost them a few cents a year if they stopped charging me and provided updates for free, forever.

Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”

#116
post #89
post #73

If a company gets rid of my free forever plan with them, there is a 0% chance that they're getting any money or positive word of mouth from me in the future. It's incredibly scummy behavior. If you're not willing to actually offer it forever, just call it a free plan instead of lying about it.

you’ve never made a mistake in your future predictions? youve never committed to something you couldnt deliver? i understand the outrage but remember the people on the other side of that screen are just humans too. many things dont turn out the way the initial intention was (im not excusing this specific instance, im just hoping for less vitriol when i someday make some over promising mistake in future). let he who i…

If you are making something as a branding or contract, then you better keep it. People break promise every time and not like all of them are evil, malicious, or should go to jail. But a bank failed to pay back frequently will definitely found themselves doubting where the customers go.

It's not because they are evil persons. It's because when that promise and trust is broken, I need to severely rethink about other thing. If they ever comes out with NPO financial report or even a formal apology, I'm fine - I mean I'm mad a bit, but not angry. They tried something and it doesn't work, like every success story (or failure story that no one asks) things do go south. But if the solution of the company is secretly hiding it or even publicly denying it (not in this case but that kind of stuff did happen before), then they are not getting a penny from me.

As making cloud storage free for everyone without ads forever is not quite possible nor sustainable, unless you farms telemetry for money (GDrive, dropbox with insane telemetry found recently). It is purely understandable and predictable the business model will die some day, and it's definitely not to blame them for not being able to keep this forever. This is not QE4 and money is not printed in house. But apology and even a changelog is free and it definitely cost more to try to hide it then be honest with it. That's a misdemeanor to perjury for me.

Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”

#117
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, I don't think that's right. I can name other scenarios: 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 ve…

> I have a personal and a work account. I learn something on weekends on the free tier and use it at work.

But have you ever used some free tier, found it to be flaky or buggy and then still continued to upgrade to the enterprise tier because they promise you the paid tier is less flaky than the free tier? I wouldn't believe them.

Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”

#118
post #89
post #73

If a company gets rid of my free forever plan with them, there is a 0% chance that they're getting any money or positive word of mouth from me in the future. It's incredibly scummy behavior. If you're not willing to actually offer it forever, just call it a free plan instead of lying about it.

you’ve never made a mistake in your future predictions? youve never committed to something you couldnt deliver? i understand the outrage but remember the people on the other side of that screen are just humans too. many things dont turn out the way the initial intention was (im not excusing this specific instance, im just hoping for less vitriol when i someday make some over promising mistake in future). let he who i…

You must have missed this part if you read the article:

> But Mattermost is breaking the “free forever” promise made to its customers, and without any acknowledgement or apology. The “free forever” note was quietly removed from Mattermost’s website in the month leading up to the announcement, and is never mentioned in the email Mattermost sent to affected customers. Surely, one can expect better than that from a company whose stated principles include “customer obsession” and “earn trust”.

Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”

#119

Their problem is they went with the 'forever' word instead of the much more common 'lifetime' word. That way they can tell you that even though you might have thought it was your lifetime they were talking about; in reality they were talking about the lifetime of something completely different.

It was indeed my lifetime. Now I have to watch out for ninjas and pianos randomly falling out of the sky, otherwise everyone's "free for lifetime" offer will be converted into paid plans.

Re: When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”

#120
post #2

This blog post is from the "never let a competitor's mistake go unnoticed" school of thought.

Yep:

1. See a competitor forced to drop free tier due to costs and VC landscape.

2. Get an avalanche of free users move to your platform.

3. Observe skyrocketing costs with meager impact on revenue.

4. Boot the free users. But hey, at least we did it with an apology. It changes everything, right?

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