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**Freemium: How do you decide what's free and what's not?**

by Tim Perry
http://httptoolkit.tech

Freemium: How do you decide what's free and what's not?

I'm working on https://httptoolkit.tech, a suite of developer tools. I've just released a first free version with a very minimal feature set, and I'm starting to build out the paid feature set (and checkout infrastructure etc) at the moment.

The hardest question I'm coming up against is how to decide what features should be free, and what should be paid only. The free version is a major marketing channel, so needs to be useful enough that it's interesting, but obviously I need there to be a strong incentive to buy the paid version.

Do you have any heuristics for where the line should be? Anybody have any stories where this decisions has gone especially well or badly for them?

Tim Perry 's avatarTim Perry
submitted this linkon February 1, 2019
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  1. 1
    1. Let users go hog wild and do whatever they want on your system for free (just a temp measure)
    2. After a few weeks look at the data and see exactly what they did
    3. Look at all the data points like #num-domains #num-requests etc
    4. Based on that data, make an educated guess on what is "enough" of each metric for them to "have a play" and test it out (that's the free plan)
    5. Also, based on that data make a educated guess about who would be a 1st tier paying customer and who would be a 2d tier power user
    6. Also, work out which of these magic levers are most important for each user type. For example #of accounts (ie team accounts) is usually a great lever for B2B and a way to move to higher price points.
    justinvincent's avatar justinvincent
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    8 years ago
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  2. 1

    This is super easy to get wrong. Long story short => most SaaS that use a freemium model end up either dying or killing the free option. Usually large growth companies open freemium to fill the top of the funnel.

    I’d study materials from Patrick at Price Intelligently. He will blow your mind on what you should do here.

    raleigh_user's avatar raleigh_user
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    8 years ago
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  3. 1

    It is a lot of trial and error. For us, it was features around branding (custom domain, no footer, etc).

    Maybe you restrict the number of domains or only allow the free version on well known public domains.

    scottwater's avatar scottwater
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    8 years ago
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    1. 1

      Same! Custom branding seems to be a good one. At the start, people won't care about a "Powered by" message or something along those lines, but ultimately people/companies will want to be able to separate themselves a bit and use their own domain, etc.

      mikefogg's avatar mikefogg
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      8 years ago
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    This comment was deleted 7 years ago

    DeletedUser's avatar DeletedUser
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    8 years ago