After 6 months of work and $1200 in revenue I made my SaaS free for everyone
Hi everyone!
I’m Alex, and I’m building a marketing platform that helps people promote their startups with zero budget.
Over the last 6 months, I’ve built a pretty cool platform that can:
- Suggest and manage up to 450 places to promote your startup
- Store and generate your marketing materials with one click using AI
- Provide a Chrome extension to auto-fill any forms with your marketing materials in one click
- Let you share your projects for collaboration
At first, I decided to offer 100 places for free and make the rest available with a one-time payment. I’ve made around 60 sales so far, but I realized that this approach won’t be enough to grow.
So I’ve decided to make all the features I currently have completely free, to make the platform more popular and attract more users.
Right now, I’m getting around 20 signups per day, but my goal is to reach 50 signups a day.
I’m not giving up on monetizing this project, but I’ve decided that revenue will come from more advanced features I’m working on now, such as social monitoring to find live discussions relevant to your startup, and a tool to discover niche communities across the internet where you can promote your project.
Do you think this is the right direction? What’s your opinion?
Here is a link if you want to give it a try: https://hypedesk.io
Hey Alex! Really appreciate you sharing this journey - it's so relatable! I'm in a similar boat with my free loyalty card app that's reached 55k+ downloads. Your decision to make everything free to drive user growth resonates with me.
I think you're absolutely on the right track. The freemium model often works better than early paywalls, especially for platforms that benefit from network effects and user-generated content. Getting to 50+ signups/day will give you much better data on user behavior and what premium features they actually value.
Your upcoming features sound promising - social monitoring and niche community discovery could definitely command premium pricing since they save significant manual research time. Have you considered:
The key is finding revenue streams that enhance rather than restrict the core free experience. I'm exploring similar paths with my app - looking beyond subscriptions to find monetization that actually adds value.
Would love to connect and swap notes on this journey. Building sustainable revenue without alienating users is such a delicate balance!