Is offering a "Free" tier beneficial?
My SaaS (https://cadvanced.app/) currently has 3 pricing tiers, the first two have a couple of key properties limited, the last one is unlimited.
I have been pondering whether it is worth me offering a "Free" tier, which is more limited than my cheapest paid tier but still usable. I am wondering what other folks experiences are?
I don't want to lose potential paid customers but I think there will always be a proportion of my app's potential user base who are unable to pay for the service, in my mind it is better to have them using it than not. There is no inherent per user cost for me, I just create another database and start the instance.
My service seems to benefit a lot from word of mouth, and is forming a nice community around it, so the more users in the community the better!
What are others experiences? Have you found having a Free tier a net gain? Are there other aspects I've not thought about?
Many thanks
I looked through the site and carefully read the pricing page. I am not in the RP community space but it seems:
1/ You have users which I assume can participate in any community for free.
2/ You have RP community managers which pay for hosting their community based on the number of players.
You state that "there is no inherent per user cost for me" but you charge per-user/per-player. I am a bit confused.
Can you quota features by the size of the playground? the number of player roles? the length of time a game run? i.e. the complexity of the game instead of the number of players in the community. If you would do such, it might be worth to have a free tier for simple RP community and charge for more complex, more involved communities without limiting those communities on the number of players they can attract.
Hi @smirolo - thanks for taking a look at the site, it's much appreciated.
Yes, I think my "there is no inherent per user cost for me" statement was not particularly well worded. What I meant was that having a customer on a free tier would have no inherent cost, it's just another instance of the app backend.
Currently there are two instance properties that are governed by the tier that the customer selects when signing up. The values for these on the lowest paid tier are still pretty generous so, as you say, a free tier with still lower, but usable, values might well work! :)
Hi Chuck, we use a two tiered model of Free and Premium for our appointment scheduling app. It works great for us, as free users are required to include our branding and so they are doing indirect advertising for us. Something like that can make your free plan more sustainable.
Hi @Ebell - thanks for taking the time to reply. Oooh, having branding on the free instances is a genius idea! I'm definitely going to do that, it makes so much sense. Thanks :)
You're welcome!