How we let down 550 of our freemium users.

While it may seem like file storage, egress, object management, CDN 's (to name just a few services) are relatively inexpensive, once you start to scale, you soon think different. Real money has to be made to support these operations, especially when you are transferring TB's of data.

We've always had 3 pricing tiers :-

• Free
• Pro
• Business

And it's been great so far, here are some numbers:-

• 550 Free customers (120 of which are monthly actives' with 60 heavily active)
• 22 Pro Customers
• 4 Business customers

In the early days it was a joy to support everyone, and I mean that. However with a small team we have now decided to drop our freemium offer. The weirdest thing is that we had 2 freemium options! Users could always use our free-free service on our home page without even signing up, it was more of a lead magnet you could say. On top of that, we had our fully fledged freemium plan with some pretty lofty limits. What were we thinking, we don't have basecamp money! 💰

One plan surely had to go, this is how we let 550 people down in a targeted email swoop.

Click on the imgur link, you may have to magnify.
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Results are in...

• 6 people wrote not so nice emails. 😠
• 2 users asked for their account to be closed 😥
• 2 people signed up for our new Personal Plan 😎
• 1 person purchased the Business Plan 💪
• 13 opened up new accounts, and are in our new 7 day full access trial 📈
• 20+ users logged back in and didn't know their password 🤣
• 300+ users did nothing (expected)
• 25% less support emails in the last 1 week 😁
• 70% reduction in new signups since removal of the freemium plan. 🙄
• 90% happier me.

I can now focus and target our Ideal Customer Profile and set our goals higher. 👱‍♂️

Our new plans

• Personal (the old free)
• Pro
• Business

Time will tell...