EasyBroker Says Adios to Freemium
easybroker.com
easybroker.com
It's like Steve Blank says in _Epiphany_: especially when you're getting started discovering customers, you want to be zeroing in on the people who are committed to solving the problem you're trying to help solve. The people you want to work with have budget for your solution. The people who don't have budget, you don't want influencing you now.
It is easy to figure out which feature to include in premium and which to limit in free, features that saves time.
If you can view 100 house listings per page, limit free to only 5. Time and convenience is something people pay money for.
Always develop for premium users and if it accidentally makes the free service better then that's a bonus.
Instead some really good points for a fully paid model. They can be more targeted in their acquisition and measuring. Makes sense.
A close reading of their first paragraph suggests they merely turned off signups but let the account type unchanged. This is essentially what I did when I got rid of anonymous guest accounts on BCC (because they converted terribly). The great majority of them will "age out" (go inactive), and as long as it isn't hindering ongoing development you can just keep them in the DB as a sop to your early adopters. (When it does start to become technical debt to maintain two code paths, you can actually disable the accounts, offer them an upgrade path at a discount, upgrade them for free, etc etc.)