How did you size your free tier?
I picked mine early, more or less by gut feel, something that felt like enough to try it but not enough to run in production on for free, and never really revisited it.
Looking back there seem to be a few different ways to approach it:
- work backward from your actual marginal cost per free unit,
- work backward from what a real target customer's typical volume looks like and stay under it on purpose,
- anchor off what comparable tools in your space offer,
- or just ship a placeholder and adjust once you can see what fraction of free users actually hit the cap.
I did a rough, unexamined mix of the first two. Curious what actually tipped it for people who went through this more deliberately, or empirically.
Trending on Indie Hackers
What stood out to me is the shift from treating feedback as something to accumulate to treating it as something that should reduce uncertainty.
The value isn't really in having more customer voices. It's in reaching a point where the next decision becomes clearer because of them.
Yep, that's a good point. I think we have the tendency to think too abstract, and/or stuck too much in our product cosmos we have created - especially technically minded people. I mean reaching out to real people and receiving feedback, is not just about marketing. After all everything comes down to real people (even though this sound like a platitude), otherwise there would be nobody who would actually need and (hopefully) pay for the product. This can feel just like numbers of subscriptions or money flowing it, but it's not.
I appreciate you taking the time to explain your thinking.
I'd be interested in continuing the conversation by email if you're open to it. What's the best email to reach you on?