Don't offer a Free Plan

A free plan is probably the wrong choice for most products. However, blanket statements that a free plan is never the right choice is naively black and white. Here are just a couple examples of strategies that can justify a free plan:

• The free users are a growth strategy (generating viral growth or referring you to your target customers)
• The free users are "the product" for another segment of your business.

Both these happen to be true for my product, and I bet there are other exceptions, so the statement "no free plans" lacks some credibility for not being fully thought through.

However, I really like the idea of a low-cost one-time payment instead of free. I may test this in the future!

Sometimes its not even feasable, think more complex AI product with vision, images, voice calls

Thank you all for the comments, really insightful! I wish I could reply-all.

Many of you raised valid cases in which a free tier makes a lot of sense, the page I made needs some more nuance. I will add a section at the end titled something like "When does a free tier make sense?". I was never under the illusion that it's black and white, but it usually allows for more engagement and make it more thought-provoking :).

Well, this is a topic for me...
My team and I have discussed this numerous times, for our product Howitzer, and decided that we shouldn't do it.
In the beginning phase, it is too expensive for our type of business to include FREE plan... The operable costs are much higher than in everything we have done before, so this time - we are going without free plans.
Let's hope it isn't a mistake :)

I offer a free plan for https://preactive.chat. It includes some branding in the product ('powered by Preactive') which drives traffic back to me. This sort of viral marketing is one of the few good reasons to have a free plan

This was one of the drivers of Drip's early success (although Rob Walling says it didn't drive as many trials as he expected): https://youtu.be/7esNsHnqAvc?t=2337

The other one is we do have a little bit of a viral element. This didn't bring as many trials as I thought it might, but we do have a 'powered by Drip' link. If you can do that, if you have an option to do it, it helps it helps you grow. The more you grow then the more you grow, right. That's how virality works.

No, and I'd even go as far to say that charging bargain basement prices is equally as problematic.

Free plan can be worthwhile for baked-in virality (i.e. "Powered by" marketing).

That's assuming your app has a front-facing component that's visible to your customer's customers.

My project benefits from free users because they invite their friends, promote my app therefore there will be more paying users later... however, I don't offer any support, so I have no problem with free users.

https://locospartygame.net

The project I’m working on was free for the longest time (years) with no paid plan whatsoever. We ended up ranking super well for certain keywords on the App Store because of it (more downloads + user reviews = higher ranking). I’m confident that if we were paid only, we wouldn’t have gotten as many downloads overall and definitely wouldn’t have gotten as many positive reviews. So I do owe it to the free plan for helping jumpstart things.

The bigger user base also helped when it came to early feedback and bug reporting.

However, once we got the initial traction and ranking I decided to move to a freemium plan and then eventually paid only. Very few users ended up converting from the free plan (as you mention above). With the transition to paid only there was definitely a drop in feedback and bugs reported, likely due to the sheer difference in usage. So that was also a con of removing the free tier.

Overall, still happy with our decision to remove the free tier though.

Our free plan doesn't even require you to sign up. At the time we introduced it, it 3-4x the folks who actually tried the app.

Depends on the product, if the product can "wow" the customer in first few minutes make it free and ideally no sign up. If it requires some work then trial makes sense, even paid.

Would you rather have 10 users that pay $100 monthly, or 1,000 users that pay $1?

I love that.

Great insights - great post. Thanks!