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Comment by philfrasty | Hacker News Reader

Have you experimented with removing your free plan? Curious to know what your support-time is in relation free:paid plans. Just from my anecdotal experience free-plans attracted the wrong type of customer for me, switching to paid with a free trial worked much better. When you have a large team and can built fancy funnels to make freemium work it seems like a great idea from a marketing perspective but for small(ish) companies I really doubt the numbers (% of upgrades from free to paid after a certain period of time) make sense in a lot of cases.

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I think this is one of things where my Business Brain 100% agrees with you (the majority of my customer support burden comes from free plans, though it's worth pointing out something like two-thirds of my paid cohort converted from free) but my Hacker Brain things this project _should_ have a free plan, because free plans are nice and good and neat.

You could run an experiment and track the data. Three cohorts: paid, free, trialing. Data points per cohort: customer support tickets per 100 accounts, conversion rate, ARPU, LTV, churn %.

I think you'll be surprised at the results. At the very least your hacker brain will be more informed, especially if you put a dollar figure on your customer support time. Doesn't have to be anything fancy, it could even be minimum wage.

A lot of small business don't nearly have the customer base to make statistically significant claims about their business.

this is obviously my cheap opinion and I am looking to get to the point where you are with my side project: I think you could have the best of both worlds by getting rid of your free plan. The key would be to wind down your free plan in a way that is respectful to your current users and you could do this by offering them a steep discount on the first year's terms or giving them ample time to make a decision once you discontinue the free plan.

You have probably enough word of mouth now and establishment to build off of with your product that you can get some new customers without it. You can always do trials or free POC periods.

I addressed this with my side business by keeping the free option pretty limited. Only a very small set of my potential customers qualify for free (very small, volunteer orgs, with very small problem spaces), so their support burden is kept pretty low. I still feel good about being able to offer something free to folks that get some value but can't afford to pay anything, but I'm not overwhelmed by ungrateful masses.

>my Hacker Brain things this project _should_ have a free plan, because free plans are nice and good and neat.

I agree free stuff is neat. I think the other side of the hacker ethos is "figure it out yourself", so I would never expect someone who hacked something together and shared it for free to then provide support for said thing. That's cool if you want to do it, but seems like asking for burnout unless you really like the support side or perhaps are looking at turning it from a free thing into a business, as you seem to be.

When somebody from free needs support, wouldn't that be a good time to "Upgrade for support or reach us on Twitter"

Depends on the person providing the thing. If you're ready to build some revenue from your thing, then yeah, upselling free customers when they need support seems like the natural thing to do.

However, there's another breed of hackers that enjoys making things more than they enjoy making money from things they make (which involves a different set of skills and interests). In which case, it's also valid to just say, "Sorry it's hard, but I can't commit to formal support."

Yeah, I think you did a better job of describing my dichotomy than I did. The galaxy brain corollary, though, is that if I get _too_ many folks who are asking for free-tier support, it means I can't support everyone at the level I'd like to; sort of a microscopic version of the OSS labor crisis.

A little second-hand anecdata: my sister works for one of the big email marketing companies and from what I've heard from her the tagging features are a _big_ thing for customers. You could perhaps try shifting "tagging" to the paid subscription or somehow constrain the tagging on free plans?

Oooh, interesting. That's good to keep in mind — thanks.

Above you felt the tradeoff to get to higher revenue was more support work (not worth it).

But perhaps the real tradeoff you're making, is to do more support work in order to allow the free tier?

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