Should you offer a free tier, a free trial – or both?

Well, I think it is quite easy to decide, it's two distinctive questions.
First - free tier or not. Whenever possible, I would go without. In my case, all my main competitors offer it, so we (feel) forced to offer it, too.

Another deciding factor for or against a free tier - how much does it cost you to offer it? The more it costs you, the more I would vote against it.

Trial - I would always offer a trial for a paid plan. How else can your customers try your product and get addicted by it?

Also, I am currently thinking of something like a "roling trial" - A trial that only starts with the first (substantial) usage, or alternatively a number of uses / logins that are allowed in the trial. Because, as a busy founder, I signed up for many 2 week trials, and then they ran out without me ever finding the time to actually try out the product, and when I asked for an extension, they denied it.. so I never became a customer. ..

For demonstration purposes?
In the case where the customer provides small data that can be quickly uploaded to the cloud, I prefer free tier.
In the case when the data is large, let the customer take the service algorithm from github(for example) as a free trial and use them locally.

Thanks for shating @Stephen

I love that the article highlights that there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to determining whether a free tier is right for your company, and that it depends on a number of factors.

Also, the article mentions that a free tier can be a great way to encourage mass adoption and create awareness for your product, but it also can be a revenue sink. Do you and others use any tool to balance the pros and cons of offering a free tier and make a decision? 🤔

I can definitely relate to the difficulty of deciding on a pricing strategy.

For my video editing app, Filma (https://filma.app), we decided to go with a freemium model and it has worked pretty well for us. We also offer some free rewards to returning users, which has helped to keep them engaged and coming back to the app.

We incorporated a free forever plan with limited capabilities that helps us onboard new customers. Free plan doesn't include some value added features and after using the free version users usually crave for the premium features. That's what working best for us after a dozens of trial and error. We've launched our beta version of our lead generation calculator for service agencies a few days ago.

We are offering a generous free plan at usermaven.com in order to get the word out but we've not been able to kick-in any viral element yet. So, we are still observing to see if it's the right fit. What do you think?

We've launched Feedbakk.io with a 14-day trial (no CC required), and then you had to choose a paid plan.

A month in we've removed the trial completely and replaced it with a free tier.
We've come to understand that our domain - user feedback - does not work well under time pressures. If your product is in a stable period - no new features, nothing happening in the market - users might not have anything to say to you. So the starting plan is forever free, and if you like the product, you can pick which paid tier fits your needs best.

This is cool :)

Offering a free trier is outstanding.
People would love to test the upgraded version whether it would fit their business.

Ideally both! A free trial allows a user to test the full features of your app. A free tier allows them to come back often to use some features of your app.

I'd say the answer for most companies is Free Trial followed by a Free Tier :)

That is an excellent reading! I am currently testing an idea, and while I included a free tier for now, because I love using products with free tiers. I find some of them to be really good (e.g., GitHub, Cloudflare, Linear), and make me feel like I would definitely pay for a paid plan if I have the need of it some day. But... I am still hesitant about it for my own product since it can quickly end up costing quite some money.

This totally depend on type of project and customer you have.
If your customer stuffs keep growing with time then you need to offer free tier for basic usage and with time they can upgrade to pro plan for more usage limit.

I’m doing a free trial and a free tier in my app.
Company 360: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/company-360/id1464857130

I think it strongly depends on your use case and sometimes you shouldn't do any of those.

As a rule of thumb: if user can fully achieve their goal during the trial - you'll just lose money from someone potentially happy to pay it

If you're running a Saas, and don't have any "fame" in your market, then you definitely have to offer a free trial with limited features (keep features that cost you the most unavailable)

+, the free trial shouldn't be longer than 7 days, otherwise leads forget about your product

After 7 days, set up automation emails to keep the users in the loop

Few months back, I added few premium features to my free ad supported app and was waiting for my first premium user but that didn't happen.

Later I read somewhere that we must provide some core useful features as premium features and not just nice-to-have features. There should be a very good justified reason for users to buy the premium version. Users should not feel that have wasted their money.

I then realised that what I had added were just nice-to-have premium features.
Now I have some good useful feature ideas that I would be adding as premium features in future release.

On https://lowm.fr/ , we will put a first free plan with limited functions in order to attract the first users and then to make them take a subscription. But the hardest part is to know how to limit the features

Free tier is the way to go. We dislike free trial because now we lose the progress we might have made or features we were using when on the trial. Freshworks should be a good case study for pricing. They offer great value at a good price point as well as a free tier that is very good IMHO.

We also strive to provide good value at a good price point. In fact, we believe in not even signing up to start testing a product. We will usually try product that require no sign up and we will sign up if we do like it. We adopt this philosophy as well in our SMS startup MessageDuck.com that we built with all the lessons from reading Indiehackers over the years.

I'm struggling with what to do with MentionFunnel. I currently have a free tier, but I think it's maybe a bit too generous as there are basically no limits on the number of mentions that a free user can get. Contemplating whether or not I should keep the free tier and add some extra limits, or remove it completely and just have a free trial 🤔

In my opinion both are good depending on the tool. Free trial will help you eliminate the one's who never intend to pay majorly but it sometimes it can also lead to heavy duplications. Whereas freemium will make them avoid creating duplicates and they'll get more sticky to tool

We offer a free tiers to DoTenX users and it almost offers all the features of paid plans with tiny exceptions.

Also being open-source, tech-savvy users get a chance to try it on their local environment.