Lengpal

try a 1 week free trial approach. it gets all the indivisuals who are dedicated to learn a language hooked to the process. the goal must be to make your product a daily habit in their life which ultimately gets them to pay for that

Love the honesty here.
I’ve also spent months stuck on the monetization side — I’m building a gamified habit-building site that’s free to explore, with an optional Pro tier.
I think your approach makes total sense: offer real value first, then introduce Pro once users see the benefit.
Cheering you on 🚀

I think it is worth trying out a monetization strategy as early as possible. If people are actually willing to pay for a product it is a very strong signal.

However, in your case I think it is vital to gain a critical mass of users as quickly as possible. If I have to wait forever to be matched with someone I'll quickly lose interest, even more so if I pay for the service.

What will the Pro plan include? Just speculating here, but I could imaging the free plan would be the basic 1-to-1 matching feature and the pro plan could then include things like customization (like the custom backgrounds you mention on the site) and group calls. I could even imagine the free plan limiting the calls to something like 30 minutes, and the pro plan providing unlimited calls.

So Freemium? It's a popular business model but I've seen people complaining later on about it. It turns out that majority of the user base is with you because you're free and will never convert.

At least that's what I've heard ;)