AMA: I offered a freemium version of my product, but removed it after 6 months.
I recently discontinued Amezmo's freemium PHP app hosting offering and I learned a lot from this experiment. I would like to share my findings in the form of an AMA.
If anyone's thinking about doing a freemium versions of their product, I can be helpful.
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Did interest increase in your product?
Why did you stop offering a freemium? Did you not attract the right kind of audience?
Lots of interest was gathered. The caveat of the free tier was a valid credit card before one could take advantage of it.
However, people actually complained about a "watermark" being inserted into the bottom of every HTML page with "Powered by Amezmo".
People also complained that a credit card shouldn't be required. I finally realized that handling these supports requests were a huge time sink.
Did anyone convert, like upgrade to paid.
I notice you only have two pricing tiers. Have you ever considered more, like daily or hour pricing. For Real Email I like to give pay per usage / api call, which I think is a low barrier to entry. Not sure whats better.
I had 1 converter, but they churned after I raised the prices from $8 to $15 per month. Other than that, there wasn't any converters.
Amezmo has hourly pricing calculations under the hood, but I haven't added the required UX to make it work. As an example, when you upgrade, the prorated amount if based on the hourly usage.
I might offer that, as it may allow people to only commit a few hours, and not a huge amount like $19 up front.
Thanks!