Competitors are 100% free!
Greetings all,
I'm currently working on a SaaS product in niche I love. I've validated the idea with my network and it is something they would pay for monthly, even more than i first thought. Today I was searching around the internet on what features competition has, and it looks like there is an app out there that does what I want to charge for for FREE! Granted this app has the backing of a big company. I believe they make some money with small ads, affiliate links, and selling user data.
Is it even worth pursing now? There are other competitors in this space that are charging as well, so it is still viable to compete with this free app.
What would IH do in this situation?
Regards,
Yaroslaw Bagriy
Trending on Indie Hackers
People pay for good.
Hell porn is free, and plenty of people still pay for porn.
So make your product good enough to pay for.
hahhaha LOVE this analogy! Will surely quote this.
Also considering that a paid product translates to a little trust. A free product is free. As a business I always have to account for the fact, that a free product may not be supported.
There are better free open source projects for which there are paid alternatives that costs $100k/year, yet businesses still opt for the paid version. Support, future-proofing, and knowing that the product is actively worked on can’t be underestimated.
How is yours better or different than the free one you found? There’s always going to be competition, so I don’t think it necessarily means you should give up. If you found people that would pay for your product then it sounds like they either don’t know about the free competitor or see yours as better.
It's just so interesting to me that someone will choose a paid product over a free one. The free product has so many features. From my research there are a few problems, which I guess are big enough for people to switch.
There's lot of people that value their time and if they feel the paid product saves them more time then it's a no-brainer for them. Depends on the product and target customer though.
Another point is that people are slowly learning that free often comes at a cost. They distrust it maybe or they are afraid that they'll get stuck and free products have no support or similar.
In short: If your product is better, stronger and worth a check. People will pay for it. @yaroslawbagriy
Have you researched how big the market is?
How long would it take you to build it? If its just a few weeks, go ahead and build it. There are lots of users who would pay for simplicity and privacy (i.e. dont sell your user data)
I think the key point is the size of the market. If it's big enough it's totally fine to launch a paid product. But you need to look better and maybe different.
Go back to all the people who said they’d pay, and ask them why the hell they aren’t using this.
I’m reminded of Level and how Derrick validated the problem, people said they’d pay, and then it turns out that people guessing about their future behavior are often wrong.
You may find out that the pain isn’t as bad as you thought. That’s the worst case.
Best case is that the product is missing something key, and all these people already tried it and quit because it misses their main need.
But you won’t know until you go and ask!
Just because a free alternative exists, doesn't mean people know about it or will use it. Google docs exist, open office exists, but plenty of people still use Microsoft Office. Just because a free alternative exists, doesn't mean people will know about it or want it.
I just wouldn't count Google Docs as free, because they will waste my time and steal my data and spam me with advertisements. In comparison to that, the €299 one-time purchase price of Microsoft Office seems worth it.
Plus, never underestimate how much usability can suffer from latency. I'd almost always pay to have the software run locally on my 16-core monster workstation instead of somewhere far away in a cloud, with a visible delay after every click.
By most definitions it is free, but you are right. I know some people who are like-minded in how you think about this. Free sometimes does turn into the consumer becoming the product. As-in, you are being targeted for ads because of what they learn about you.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
Thank you for posting this! I'll give it a read now.