Should you offer a free tier on launch?

@dearroy has some points you can think of. This is the same thing I heard from Convertkit where the founder mentioning about Mailchimp story "we allowed people to use the product for free. And when this users handle different client project or move to another organisation, they recommend us".

So you need to see where is your UPSELL happens by providing the free plan.

Let me also share our personal story https://tradly.app
Last week we released our Pay as You go package which starts with Zero. Where we charge 1% transaction fee for the hosting, features, etc we are providing for free.

But we didn't start free initially before 2.5 Years. We didn't offer free trial. It's because we are bootstrapped with personal funds we had. So we need to make sure we have run rate
to continue the business. Meaning have always operational cost backup through this payments . So from the day1, we charged. It's not a small fee of $10. it's start with $99 to medium level deal size.

This helped us to find customers who are serious about business. and who has money to run their business. The people who invest money in what they are doing will take the things serious. So we also become serious about taking feature request from people who can pay money. If you give something for free, people always keep asking new things without even accepting they are using a free product. This is my understanding.

And also we identified what are all the things that doesn't take Human resource time to support a client. So after 1.5 years, we released a sandbox solution which is free to test the demo of the product. Until before that, there wasn't any SELF SIGNUP. it's pure inbound meetings to discuss.

You could try 7days trial as @paulNL mentioned, it surely get someone serious into your plan.

So even with our recent pricing release, it still people need to pay $ if there is a growth in business.

Building a product is hard, and giving out for free doesn't make logical sense at all. Use free as advantage where you want brand awareness, test users, or like mailchimp strategy.

Ah ya one more careful thing, if you notice smart brands who has free plan, they tell "Community Support". or "No email tickets". Because for free users, we can't take liability for their additional needs. That's the trade off for free users.

Don't worry if somebody leaves your platform because you don't provide free users, they are not worth to it. Always allow people to test your product but not lifelong free.

Personally I have decided to never offer a freemium model again. I used to operate a freemium webbuilder that attracted over 500,000 free users. It attracted a pretty large group of users that couldn’t be converted to paying customers.

I would rather offer a cheaper plan with limited functionality or a 7 day trial then offering your product for free. That way you only attract customers who are willing to pay for your services.

But your results may of course be different depending on the market.

This year I do plan on building and launch 4 SaaS projects, all of them will be with paid plans only.

Two rules of thought (1) Get new users fast so you can use them for better tuning the Product to Market fit. (2) Always charge for your product, as this is the number one validator of Product to Market fit. The reality, no one has Product to Market fit perfection on day one, or year one. A user base, even unpaid, can open up viral opportunities. After year one, you can introduce price increases even when you might have user base loss. Since after this process, your product will be better tuned faster. Then you plan a strategy forward. Just don't offer and long term free promise. Your best users will stay with you.

At HeyForm project, we provide almost 95% of basic form features for free, and we believe there will be a high added value from free customers, they use and spread for us, which in return reduce our marketing cost.