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Don't Offer a Free Plan

nofreeplan.com

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Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#201

Post by psanford »

start123 wrote: post #168

I recently shut down my free plan and instead introduced Trial on paid plans. Brought in a new entry level plan that is far cheaper https://blanq.io/pricing.html to make the transition easier. As an indiehacker, the free plan allowed me to iron out bugs and improve the overall experience of the platform. But the amount of effort it took to maintain the free plan was enormous so, I shut it down. I informed users about…

Slack and Trello didn't start out as large companies, but they did both start out with a free tier.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#202

Post by scrollaway »

koheripbal wrote: post #195
scrollaway wrote: post #5

Since this headline is likely to have a decent amount of people reading comments and not the article, I just want to highlight their suggestion of a "lifetime try-out plan". It's a pretty original thought, I don't think I've ever seen a SaaS use that. I have seen trial plans with a small $ attached before though.

Plex Pass is like this.

No? Plex Pass has a lifetime plan (happy user of it here), not a "lifetime paid trial" plan.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#203

Post by Strom »

dataflow wrote: post #23
mmaunder wrote: post #10

It is sad but true that users that pay less, or zero, are more demanding on customer support and make unreasonable demands via social. Had a guy this week using our free product that has 90% of the paid products features berating us on Twitter for not being 100% free and demanding we convert and rely on donations to support our 40 person team. Makes me regret having a free offering. In my 20 years doing software star…

My guess is part (not all) of this is due to people assuming that free offerings are already generating revenue in some fashion other than a direct payment (e.g., advertising for Google/Facebook), and thus they're still helping your business and entitled to support as much as anybody. Whether the assumption is right or wrong for each business, it's not hard to see how we've gotten here.

This is correct in my experience. It also cuts deeper than just advertising or selling user data. It's the classic exposure argument. Give me the service for free and someone else might pay for it who hears about the service through my social network.

As discussed elsewhere in this thread, this line of thinking can even be completely reasonable for various services that have low costs associated with the free offering. It's when the free offering costs a significant amount to operate that you start running into trouble.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#204

Post by kwanbix »

One 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 euros per month (we are 4), and then pay 48 euros per year. Or even a family plan of 5 euros per month per family of 4.

Instead, we pay 0, and use the exact same resources.

The same happened with a calendar service (those apps that allow you to reserve and appointment with a doctor or hairdresser or whatever).

Their free tier was obviously 0. And then they asked for 30 dollars per month for 20 features. I needed only 2 of those features.

I asked if there was a way to pay only for those. It wasn't. So I ended up moving to a competitor which was much cheaper (10).

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#205

Post by thomasikzelf »

scrollaway wrote: post #5

Since this headline is likely to have a decent amount of people reading comments and not the article, I just want to highlight their suggestion of a "lifetime try-out plan". It's a pretty original thought, I don't think I've ever seen a SaaS use that. I have seen trial plans with a small $ attached before though.

Sublime text has this: "Sublime Text may be downloaded and evaluated for free, however a license must be purchased for continued use. There is currently no enforced time limit for the evaluation."

https://www.sublimetext.com/3

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#206

Post by vetinari »

virgilp wrote: post #189
curryst wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not familiar enough with SSO flows to be able to quantify any kind of risk, but it makes me very uneasy when things interconnect with my bank. Everything always seems secure until it isn't. I don't mean to spread FUD, it just seems needlessly risky to make banks the central point of auth.

It really isn't/ shouldn't be. In theory, the bank is really incentivized to provide proper and secure authentication (if someone can impersonate you to your bank, you're kinda screwed anyway). So, it only makes sense to trust a bank to provide the authentication service. One should realize that SSO integration with a bank doesn't mean 3rd party has any sort of access to the bank - it' just means that you authorize y…

It does increase the risk for you, the same way using Google or Facebook account does.

Once the bank won't authenticate you for some reason, all the accounts bound to this SSO provider also go the way of dodo.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#207

Post by jlbnjmn »

jitl wrote: post #117

At Notion, we used to have a limited free plan where we only allowed users to create 1000 blocks (pages/paragraphs/embeds/checkboxes/database rows) before we directed them to upgrade to the "Personal Pro" plan. Supporting free users dealing with the block limit was a major headache, just as described in the OP, but more importantly the Personal Pro plan was kind of a dead end - few users converted to Pro, and those t…

This is a great example of good strategy coming from better understanding and not a better template.

Thanks for sharing!

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#208

Post by andrewem »

9dev wrote: post #186
andrewem wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you (or anyone else here) done that and succeeded at it? I can see why one would assume it could somehow be useful, but in the absence of someone accomplishing it I’m skeptical.

I'm actually doing that currently. We have a large database of company records compiled from different sources. Naturally, some of those records are duplicates. We have cleaned the data as much as it was possible using algorithmic approaches, but that only gets you so far. To go the last mile, we added widgets to the pages showing similar records where users may click "same company" or "other company". Poll results a…

I’m glad it’s working well for your use case, especially with the final expert evaluation.

What it makes me think of is genealogy, part of which can be thought of as the process of assigning records (birth, marriage, death, census, etc) to entities (natural persons). These are complex determinations requiring understanding and correlating multiple records, and analyzing them in terms of information which is not explicit in the records (eg, knowing about relevant place names, name changes, etc). In the case of businesses, imagine trying to figure out the connection or lack of connection between the many Ray’s Pizza shops in New York City, as they open, close, and change names, locations, and owners over time.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#209

Post by jlbnjmn »

musicale wrote: post #82
prawn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried iMovie at some point but it was too limited to assess the featureset that would be required. DaVinci Resolve's free tier gives you basically everything short of 5K export, built-in noise reduction, and a couple of other things - easily proved itself indispensable so I happily upgraded. You also get some great forum help from high-end Resolve users that is relevant to those learning.

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 codebase into a mass market interface" versions.

Admittedly I haven't used them in years but I do recall learning about non linear editing in premiere pro years ago and ditching iMovie for adobe in a flash.

More recently I've gone the resolve route as well, even though I have active adobe subscriptions through with along with years of experience.

I just don't like cloud dependent software.

Re: Don't Offer a Free Plan

#210

Post by jlbnjmn »

SatvikBeri wrote: post #30
9dev wrote: post #11

The article is missing out a huge argument in favour of free plans: the opportunity to generate data. This doesn’t even need to be done in a shady manner - imagine analysing what users usually type in free form boxes, normalise that and build a tag hierarchy, for example. There’s a billion way to make a free plan useful - it’s not just a curtesy to your users!

The problem is that free users aren't a representative sample of people who'll pay. I remember a 37signals post that mentioned how something like 90% of their paying users were designers, but that was only 5% of their free users. If you optimize on a sample that's structurally bad, no matter how large it is, you'll end up building the wrong thing.

Seriously!

Quantity data is not a substitute for quality data.

Give an engineer a qualitative data point and they'll find a way to invalidate it.

But give them a million invalid data points...

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