Change in Pricing

Despite all the advice from other indie hackers, I believed my product was different and I could pull it off and I added a free plan to Bkmark.

This was a mistake and here's why.

My Previous Pricing

I went for the freemium model: a very restrictive free plan (only 50 bookmarks and 3 collections) plus three paid plans, starting a $5 per month.

My theory was: people will sign-up, adopt Bkmark and when they hit 50 bookmarks, they will upgrade.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

The problem with a free plan

Most free users will not convert

About one month in operation, all the paid customers either signed up on a paid plan or converted within a few days. Nobody had upgraded to a paid plan if they had been on the platform for over 2 weeks.

Free users bring other free users

It's the sad truth, but following conversations with my customers, I noticed none of them got onto the app from a recommendation from a free user. Instead, their own curiosity led them to Bkmark. They have a problem and my tiny marketing effort reached them.

On the other hand, the vast majority of the free users got onto the app from seeing my Twitter bot (which is a free feature) or by word of mouth from other free users. I love that my app is marketed with word of mouth. However, if the main selling point is that it has a free plan, I'm not in business, I'm running a side project.

Free users are a LOT of customer support

I was spending more time responding to free users and guiding them to the docs than serving the customers (who on the other hand, are very resourceful in finding what they need and come to me only as a last resort).

This was cutting on my marketing and development times. I don't have VC money and time is one of my most valuable resources.

Free users don't value their privacy

The whole idea of Bkmark is to have a place for your bookmarks free of adverts and where you're in control of what you share with the community. Free users don't mind ads. Conversations highlighted they would take ads instead of paying for the service, which goes against the mission of Bkmark.

Free users play the system

A number of users would max out their free plan, and delete bookmarks to stay within the bounds of the free plan. Which was pretty interesting to me, as I hadn't seen that one coming.

This might sound like a rant against free users, but I am very grateful I had a free plan to start with. I received a lot of very valuable feedback on the product, edge cases I hadn't thought about and help in hunting down bugs.

Moreover, simply seeing my product being used by so many people is surreal!

However, it was not sustainable as a solo founder to support so many free users.

My New Pricing Plan

More customer conversations highlighted that my paid plans were not offering enough (in terms of volumes, not features) to attract the true power users. And this was intentional, as I was diverging some of the resources to support free users.

As such I have bumped up the quotas on paid plans and moved to a 14-day trial model.

Already I am seeing a sharp drop in daily signups, but I am expecting those signing up to truly have a problem with their bookmarks, and I'm going to work my best to solve this problem for them.

This is an experiment and depending on how it goes within a month, I will adjust accordingly.

I am building in public on Twitter. Don't hesitate to follow if you want to know more 👉 https://twitter.com/BorisTane