Should we offer a free tier?

Would say nope. Free tier / freemium model is rough. Conversion to paying customers will likely be a lot higher without it. You risk acting on the wrong feedback, and optimizing upgrade paths instead of core product. ideal is dealing only with real customers who are willing to pay to have their problems solved by your product.

Caveat to this is if market is very large with network effects, and the value of the service increases over time eg. Spotify, Dropbox, etc..

I think a free tier is better than a free trial. From a consumer perspective, I'm planning on launching with a free tier that will work more like a demo with super limited functionality. That way the user can test it out without commiting. Then I will also have a free trial.

Although I've also heard that it's way better for business to not have it. But I will start with it and then adapt :)

I love the idea of a free tier, and will have on on https://1brand.co. However, before creating a free tier it's probably a good idea to:

1. Have a clear plan that's been validated with users on how you'll convert them to paid
2. How to monetize them in other ways if you can't get them to pay you (without a crappy ad-driven experience)
3. Ideally, some other value trade-off you can use to grow your business from the free tier.

We offer free tier but only for users that does not use computation resources. All their data is stored locally and they get the benefit of the product without costing us money.

No, unless you have the capacity to support the additional volume and support that free users will require. Free users are usually not fun to deal with, and are quick to churn without offering any feedback. Businesses on your free tier are likely to be low quality.

In my opinion, if you want to create a business as a bootstrapped founder, you'll likely be able to do that much faster if you charged for your service. This is especially true for B2B services, as in your case. If your customers have their own customers that they need to announce changes to, chances are they can pay you. And if they can't, they'll likely churn within 6 months anyways.

I am also toying with that idea myself for Yuum: https://yuum.io/. I really want to avoid free users to be honest as I too have heard they are the most demanding. I would rather have 1000 paying users than 10k free users. I think I am going to offer a free 14 day trial with a 30 day money back policy. I am really struggling on how to price my service and I am thinking about pricing it at $20/month. I thought about adding a separate fee but I don't think that is a great idea.

This is a judgment call as free tier works for some products, while for others it fails miserably.

in my opinion there should always be a free tier.
it gives you exposure, onboards users without high friction (adding CC) and lets them test your product.

I’m playing with the pricing page (https://www.emetti.com/pricing/) for our upcoming release: Emetti.

On one level, I figure we should avoid a free tier. In the past, I’ve found that free users are often more trouble than they’re worth—and tend to direct the product in the wrong direction. (Whereas, paying customers are often easier to work with, and provide more usable feedback.)

On the other hand, a free tier might serve as a reasonable way to advertise the service. Specifically: Anyone on that tier will have our logo and link embedded in the sidebar. As such, they’re effectively allowing us to advertise on their site at a nominal cost to us.

I can reason this out either way, depending on the moment. So, I’m looking for other viewpoints. I’m curious if anyone here has played with these two options, what they chose, and how it worked out. Thanks in advance for any feedback you can provide. :-)