Monetizing Freemium. How do you decide which features to make paid/free?

My time tracker product is still in development, but I will release with a freemium model that has all features available. I will rate how much history free users will see and I hope this approach will get users to try it out, and upgrade if they like what they see.

Nice topic. I am working on my mobile app monetization. I will share my thought.

After making concurrent research. I noticed people leaving bad reviews only because you need to pay for basic features. So I started thinking about the drawing line.
If you make all features paid. Maybe it's better not to make a freemium app. If you give too much then you will lose money.
So in my opinion. You need to know your user base and separate them by categories. Basic and power users.
My approach is to monetizing power users. Know which features are above basic usage and add them to premium. For basic users constantly add value and hope they become power users. (Or educate and convert to power users)

There are no standard formulae for pricing. Personally, I tried to cut my free plan for my app SEO Product Optimizer. Originally, there is a free plan and a basic plan charging for $15.99 / m. My paid plan removes the limitation to do actions in-app.

After I cut the plan, there are almost no new users installing my users. Seems that my users would like to try before buying. I asked on IH about this issue before conducting the experiment, just like what you did now.

From the public opinions, it seems that the new users would only cause me extra workloads on customer support. So I decided to hide it for several days. But it didn't work out at all. So I switched back. I could upsell somethings to the free users anyway. Not a big deal.

Indeed, new users give me some cs issues to handle. However, they are also reporting some urgent issues, do testing. I just leave it alone.

Do you have a way to limit the usage of your product ? Like rate-limiting or quantity-limiting.

This is the technique used by Slack and Notion, who allow free customers to use the product within reasonable limits, and convert them to paid once they have enough engagement and want more out of it.

For access-limiting (some features only exist in paid plans), it depends how much value you see out of it. The core of your product should be usable for free users, but "surrounding" features (eg: export to PDF, bulk manipulation of data, anything that can make power-users more productive) are good candidates for premium paid features.