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

blog.zulip.com

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

#181

Post by blagie »

bruce511 wrote: post #112
blagie wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't make categorical statements like that. Free forever (without the promise) has worked well for many businesses, for github/gitlab, to Google, to quite a few others. A few models which have worked:

1) Limited to a single user (no team use);

2) Not have appropriate compliance for corporate use;

3) Limited enough to be free to provide and not viable for any real-world use (e.g. 15 minutes / 100 API calls per month);

4) Incompatible licensing (AGPL/proprietary dual licensing is an example);

5) Making everything on the free model world-public (MANY rapid prototyping tools do this)

The goal is usually to be adequate for nights/weekends personal projects, open-source projects, and internal prototyping, but to require customers who can pay to need to pay. How you do that depends on your business.

The higher-level point is that working from categorical points is not good business strategy. As with any tool, something like free, free forever, etc. can be good or bad, depending on how it's used, and requires a careful case-by-case analysis. If you remove tools from your toolchain based on categorical guidelines, you will be at a disadvantage.

The nice piece about the "forever" is that people change jobs every 3 years. I exhausted my trial tiers at several vendors in my first job (several of which switched to paying). Guess who's not being experimented with in my current job? All the vendors whose free tiers I exhausted, but whom I didn't adopt.

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

#182

Post by WolfRazu »

asynchronyse wrote: post #147

Google pulled off a similar thing with their photos app. Offered "unlimited" storage in 2016, improved the AI leveraging all our data, discontinued in 2021. Never using cloud again.

Wasn't it still "unlimited" for photos uploaded before the cut-off? That's quite reasonable for a free service vs. "paid lifetime".

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

#183

Post by zztop44 »

finnjohnsen2 wrote: post #180

"forever" or "lifetime" to a running service is a red flag. It makes no sense unless you explicitly know how it fits their business model. Ex they take your data, have ads etc They made a mistake promising you such a deal, but I dare say you also made a mistake trusting it.

I think it’s clear that “lifetime” means the lifetime of the service. There are some services where the economics work out. And some where it doesn’t. But I agree that “free forever” is a much more aspirational statement than “lifetime access” and shouldn’t be trusted too much.

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

#184

Post by zztop44 »

This is a bit off topic but I think it’s now clear that of the (many) open source Slack-alternative products Zulip emerged as the best of the bunch.

They had a great differentiator with the focus on threading and they executed really well. Congratulations to the team.

Overall, I think Discord and Teams won the space - but it’s a big market and I think Zulip will be around for a long time.

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

#185

Post by II2II »

swyx wrote: post #89
pikdum wrote: 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’ve never made a mistake in your future predictions? youve never committed to something you couldnt deliver?

I do my outright best not to avoid over-promising, since over promising can cause harm to others. Consider two parties here: the customer and the the competition. The harm to the customer is rather obvious since the terms have been changed for them. It would manifest itself in higher costs, the need to alter their work, or both. One could argue that they should not have depended upon a free tier, but ... the same cannot be said for the competition which was offering a real product. They have to deal with (potential) customers who were pulled away by a snake-oil salesman. While my wording is likely unduly harsh. Given how quickly the changes were made, the free tier was likely a poorly thought out plan rather than a malicious one, it is important to remember that an attempt to draw in customers is often intended to pull them away from others. You better be sure you can live up to your word.

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

#186

Post by asynchronyse »

WolfRazu wrote: post #182
asynchronyse wrote: post #147

Google pulled off a similar thing with their photos app. Offered "unlimited" storage in 2016, improved the AI leveraging all our data, discontinued in 2021. Never using cloud again.

Wasn't it still "unlimited" for photos uploaded before the cut-off? That's quite reasonable for a free service vs. "paid lifetime".

> quite reasonable

Maybe. I'd use the word 'compensatory'.

Using two apps to access half of my media each renders either one useless.

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

#187

Post by Dalewyn »

orphea wrote: post #156
Dalewyn wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Users will invest their time and resources into using your product based on the promise that it’s free forever. Unless you're a naive new entrant into the real world who doesn't know better, it's on you if you're fooled into thinking something is "free forever". There is no such thing as a free lunch.

You resort to victim blaming. Words should have meaning, you know? If there is no such thing as a free lunch, then you should not be allowed to offer free lunches.

The saying goes that if you're fooled twice, you're the one to be shamed. The world isn't a nice place filled with unicorns and fairy dust, unfortunately.

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

#188

Post by taffronaut »

For 25 years, Image Line have been shipping the FLStudio DAW as a one-off purchase with free lifetime updates, and since I've been receiving those updates for a significant chunk of those 25 years since I bought the Producer Edition, it seems pretty sustainable.

In their words "Why? Because we believe you should get the program you paid for, bug-fixed and updated for as long as we develop FL Studio." [1]

[1] https://www.image-line.com/fl-studio/lifetime-free-updates/

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

#189

Post by anonzzzies »

People don't look at the history of the company or the owners when they sign up; if I sign up for a 'one time pay, forever' plan, I need to to know this company, or, if it's new, the owners, have a history of delivering on promises in the past. If I sign up with a company that has delivered something for the past 15 years reliably and now add a forever plan, I can assume with some certainty it will continue. If it's startup of 1 month old with some owners without track record, I can assume they won't honour this deal when things go either really well or really badly. But I guess most people just buy stuff like this on a whim and then complain it doesn't work out.

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

#190

Post by xemdetia »

Aeolun wrote: post #32
0xcde4c3db wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Does anyone have any insight as to why companies fail to do this? 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.

Sometimes it's also abuse too depending on the product. If you have a product that can get twisted into a phishing mechanism or injecting crypto miners somehow that can be the worst for whack a mole. I still think in many cases this is solved by just discontinuing new free plans and dealing with the population you already had.
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