We gained 100 users this month. Most of them will never pay us a cent

Last month we had 240 customers. Now we have 340. Should feel like a win.

Except 220 of those are on the free plan, and only 120 are paying. And that's not an accident, it's exactly what we built for.

When we designed our free plan, we made a deliberate call: put in everything a typical small business actually needs, not a crippled version meant to nudge people toward paying. Enough messages to run real conversations, one site or store, room for up to 10 students in a course.

We turned out to be right. Most customers who sign up just stay there. The free plan genuinely covers what they need, so there's no reason to leave it.

We got exactly what we set out to build, and now it's quietly working against us. MRR is around $6k, growing, but nowhere near the pace the user count is. Most of the people showing up land somewhere the free plan already covers, so the reason to upgrade never really shows up on its own.

I don't have a fix for this yet. Still working out whether the answer is tightening what's on the free plan, giving paying customers something the free tier genuinely can't touch, or accepting slower revenue growth as the price of building something people don't have to pay for before it's useful to them.

Curious if anyone else designed a free tier this generously on purpose and ran into the same wall.