Free lifetime access for beta users?

Honestly our "free forever" users have spent so much time giving us feedback, sharing our product with other people, and even promoting it in the communities they run that it's been totally worth it.

I think you just need to vet your signups to see that they are truly your target user.

For instance, we do have some "dead weight" free beta users who took effort to onboard but aren't technical enough to "get" our tool. But those people wouldn't have converted anyways.

Just don't run the free beta period for too long, and make sure you only accept beta users who are willing to give you feedback and realize that's part of the "deal" of being a beta user. For example, I required personal interviews for each beta user so I could do customer development. People who just want something "for free" won't put in the effort, so you can weed them out.

Hope that gives you some ideas :)

I totally disagree with @DanHulton. What you have to understand about Beta users is that there access is never free. They are paying in having to deal with a product lacking polish and helping you polish. https://www.uclusion.com beta users are free forever (and so are open source builders https://github.com/Uclusion/uclusion_customer/blob/master/README.md) but the beta program won't last very long and then we will charge.

I agree with @momoko.

We just launched our product, Phlywheel (https://www.phlywheel.com/) after doing about a six week beta period.

Our beta users were SO IMPORTANT for tweaking our platform and making it optimal for users. Their ability to learn and understand our product has made them somewhat role models in our community now that we have launched (i.e. "look at all these other members that have been able to get all this help with marketing their businesses").

Further, they have been helping to keep the community conversation from going stale by engaging with new members. And we can always count on them to attend events and happy hours.

In the end, we didn't give them "free forever" access, because we felt that that might seem a little unfair to other users, but they receive heavily discounted and often free access to premium features.

We'd be nothing without our beta testers :)

We offered free lifetime membership to our beta testers as long as they kept on using our platform.

I joined the team right before beta ended. It was limited to 100 users for a certain time period and feedback was part of the deal. Feedback from users are so important when starting out. As others said, vetting the testers is a sound advice.

don't make it about the price. make it about the connections. one person using your stuff, giving feedback, showing you a new perspective, giving you guidance based on their own skill set is worth any other paid users

I would lean towards "heavy discount," personally. If something is free, you have less incentive to use it, but if you have paid any amount at all, there's the urge to get value from the purchase.

If all you want is numbers, free is fine. If you want actual usage from users so that you can get real feedback, charge for it.