Day 9 with Clowd — on pricing philosophy and why we give a custom domain away free.

When I was designing Clowd's pricing, I kept coming back to one question: what's the feature that makes someone feel the product is actually theirs?

For Clowd, that answer is obvious — a custom domain. When your delivery link is on your own brand, not ours, it stops feeling like a tool you borrowed and starts feeling like infrastructure you own.

So I put it on the free plan.

Most tools gate this. It's typically the unlock that pushes free → paid conversions. Every pricing playbook says keep your best feature behind a paywall.

I disagree. Here's why:

If the free plan can't make someone feel the product at its best, the conversion to paid is based on incomplete information. They're upgrading without knowing what they're really getting. That's a bad foundation for retention.

The customers who upgrade Clowd do so because they've hit real volume limits — more sites, more storage, more deliveries. Not because we hid the good stuff.

I'd rather have 100 customers who genuinely need more than 1,000 customers who feel tricked.

Still early, still testing. But so far the approach is holding: free plan sign-ups who activate the custom domain feature convert to Pro at a meaningfully higher rate than those who don't.

Give people the thing that makes them feel it. Then ask for money.

→ https://clowd.host — free to start, always.