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Why Free Plans Don’t Work

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Re: Why Free Plans Don’t Work

#31

Post by Groxx »

emanuer wrote: post #27
rmc wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not buy the non-free plan for a week, then cancel? Or email them. They might use PayPal, perhaps you could transfer money in there if you know the right account.

Most important reason: laziness I am not going out of my way to give them money. However I am perfectly willing to pay when they change their price structure. [For dropbox I found their prices per GB are almost double of cheaper competitors. They could charge much less per GB if they would get money from more customers]

Vs Google's storage costs (Docs lets you store up to 1gb files of any kind), they're 8x more expensive (400gb for $100 vs 50gb).

Granted, the service is very different, and Google is ever-so-slightly larger. It's still a big jump.

Re: Why Free Plans Don’t Work

#32

Post by danfitch »

For the launch of my next site I am going to do a limited number of free accounts a day(starting at different times in the day). Then you won't get overrun with free users, but allow people to give you their email to let them know when more free accounts are available. Not sure if this will help but worth a shot. Might force people to try it paid if they don't want to wait.

Re: Why Free Plans Don’t Work

#33

Post by bmcnamara82 »

michael_dorfman wrote: post #21
bmcnamara82 wrote: post #17

Instead of saying that "free" plans don't work outright, I argue that they work for some type of products and don't work for other products. He provided examples of niche products that so far, serve small markets. LessAccounting, Crazy Egg, - what is their user base numbers? One example he gives has a user base of 5,000 users. If you are a niche product, I don't think the free plan is ideal since you are serving a sm…

Conversely, if you have an app that is going to get a really large user base, and I'm talking 'millions', then it probably will work (i.e. google, twitter, facebook, ect.) Actually, not. None of those are using a "freemium" model; they are all ad-based products. If your business model is dependent upon giving advertisers eyeballs, "free" is a great way to go-- but that has nothing to do with the topic at hand.

"Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc., then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base."

From Fred Wilson's mouth (he coined the term "Freemium")

Re: Why Free Plans Don’t Work

#34

Post by shadowsun7 »

emanuer wrote: post #16

I was just thinking this about Evernote the other day. I really want to pay them. They make a great product that serves me very well. I do believe they deserve my money. The problem is, the payed plan would be a complete waste for me. I don't need it. The free thing fulfills my needs perfectly. If it would be a 30 days trial, I would be a happily paying customer by now. The same thing is true for dropbox for me. Afte…

RE: Dropbox - just wait till you run out of space. I love their product, and I'm currently not paying. But trust me - when I finally run out of space (and I will!) I'll do it, no questions asked. They're giving me so much value already that I can't imagine living without them.

Re: Why Free Plans Don’t Work

#35

Post by emanuer »

Groxx wrote: post #28
emanuer wrote: post #16

I was just thinking this about Evernote the other day. I really want to pay them. They make a great product that serves me very well. I do believe they deserve my money. The problem is, the payed plan would be a complete waste for me. I don't need it. The free thing fulfills my needs perfectly. If it would be a 30 days trial, I would be a happily paying customer by now. The same thing is true for dropbox for me. Afte…

I'm not touching Evernote again until they get exporting features. It's a really impressive, useful service, but despite their repeated claims of supporting open formats they've provided utterly squat in the past few years I've watched them. Years . More than enough time to write exporters (not even .txt / .rtf!) if they value it at all.

I absolutely agree. I tried to get the my data into other formats by creating a RSS feed for the non-critical information. But the RSS feed you get is a joke. I still like their service very much.

Re: Why Free Plans Don’t Work

#36

Post by [deleted] »

mortenjorck wrote: post #29
Groxx wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not touching Evernote again until they get exporting features. It's a really impressive, useful service, but despite their repeated claims of supporting open formats they've provided utterly squat in the past few years I've watched them. Years . More than enough time to write exporters (not even .txt / .rtf!) if they value it at all.

Sounds like a good freemium upsell to me.

[deleted]

Re: Why Free Plans Don’t Work

#37

Post by Ardit20 »

loewenskind wrote: post #4
someone_here wrote: post #3

0.8% of free user accounts eventually upgraded to paid. When only 1% of users were using paid?! That's doubling your paid user-base!

But how many free users came in in the mean time? Maybe the raw number was doubling but the paid user percentage wasn't. And even it was he found a way to get an 800% increase.

He said the revenue was remaining flat. That is the revenue was not increasing, so the core number of paid users was not increasing either.

Re: Why Free Plans Don’t Work

#38

Post by Groxx »

mortenjorck wrote: post #29
Groxx wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not touching Evernote again until they get exporting features. It's a really impressive, useful service, but despite their repeated claims of supporting open formats they've provided utterly squat in the past few years I've watched them. Years . More than enough time to write exporters (not even .txt / .rtf!) if they value it at all.

Sounds like a good freemium upsell to me.

I might actually go for it if that were the case. It'd have to be damn-good exporting, however - quite frankly, I don't trust them with my data, especially given their lack of export progress + claims. The company as a whole doesn't seem too trustworthy. I want a panic button.

Re: Why Free Plans Don’t Work

#39

Post by horacegrant »

danfitch wrote: post #32

For the launch of my next site I am going to do a limited number of free accounts a day(starting at different times in the day). Then you won't get overrun with free users, but allow people to give you their email to let them know when more free accounts are available. Not sure if this will help but worth a shot. Might force people to try it paid if they don't want to wait.

Just seems a bit arbitrary to me.

Re: Why Free Plans Don’t Work

#40

Post by revorad »

bmcnamara82 wrote: post #17

Instead of saying that "free" plans don't work outright, I argue that they work for some type of products and don't work for other products. He provided examples of niche products that so far, serve small markets. LessAccounting, Crazy Egg, - what is their user base numbers? One example he gives has a user base of 5,000 users. If you are a niche product, I don't think the free plan is ideal since you are serving a sm…

maybe you aren't creating a compelling enough product to get a user demand that supports a 'freemium' biz model.

That sounds backwards to me. It seems that most web startups are not creating a compelling enough product to get people to pay for it. So instead, they are trying to get famous by giving it away for free and try to run the business on measly conversion rates until they can sell the money-sink to a big company.

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