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Comment by jxf | Hacker News Reader

This blog post is from the "never let a competitor's mistake go unnoticed" school of thought.

Not sure I totally agree. Capitalizing on a competitors mistake is kind of slimy; calling out their poor business practices is not.

Users will invest their time and resources into using your product based on the promise that it’s free forever. Changing your mind later puts the burden on them to figure out how to move forward.

Even if I was a free user and I was considering a paid plan that type of dishonesty would make me move to a competitor. What else will they change their mind on? No thanks.

They should at least grandfathered any users on the -free forever- plan

Agreed. Does anyone have any insight as to why companies fail to do this? Naively as a non-{marketing,business development,COO} guy, I feel like the cost to keep delivering those services ought to pale in comparison to the value of having even a tiny number of those customers go into a forum like HN or Reddit and say "we've been there since the early days and we're really happy".

Sure, it's inherently a tech/financial/support load to maintain a special category of customer, but I don't see it as fundamentally any different from a successful company managing the discontinuation of a popular product. You cut off new customers, let attrition take its course for the existing ones, and take your lumps from any high-value/high-touch customers who drag their feet on moving to the new thing. It's work, but so is climbing a ladder. Do you want to elevate the company or not?

> Does anyone have any insight as to why companies fail to do this?

It’s really hard to quantify the positive benefit of letting them stay, and really easy to quantify that letting them stay is going to cost us $500/month forever.

Turnover still applies to the “free” users. If the burden is simply so high the company is going to fail otherwise then do what you got to do, but don’t assume grandfathering people in means spending X$/month for the next hundred years or anything.

Sometimes it's also abuse too depending on the product. If you have a product that can get twisted into a phishing mechanism or injecting crypto miners somehow that can be the worst for whack a mole. I still think in many cases this is solved by just discontinuing new free plans and dealing with the population you already had.

> let attrition take its course for the existing ones

The reasoning breaks down here. There's not likely to be a lot of attrition for a free product compared to a paid one. It costs nothing to continue and costs time to cancel.

> Does anyone have any insight as to why companies fail to do this?

Because their responsibility to do so hasn't (yet) been translated into legal liability.

A lot would change if someone could successfully sue a company for not keeping one of these sorts of promises.

Or tell them it may stop being free in X years, where X is large enough that it’s aways off but close enough that some decide to switch. And then stop new signups but never actually take away the free plan.

The “good work Wesley, I’ll probably charge you in the morning” plan.

That Princess Bride reference evolved well. Top form!

Or just "free hosting", no further details needed. Later they may say "this was unsustainable and we will drop this", and that would be OK.

> Not sure I totally agree. Capitalizing on a competitors mistake is kind of slimy; calling out their poor business practices is not.

Which part of what I wrote didn't you agree with?

obviously I'm not GP because, what is wrong with capitalizing on a competitor's mistake? Isn't that the point of competition?

Yeah, not sure about this either. What it does do is to make me think about the free tier for apps I use, and then wondering what I will do if that free tier becomes more expensive than the value I get out of it.

This reminds me of the love/hate relationship I have with the Fusion 360 free tier, and maybe even some paid tiers where lifetime is not really lifetime.

You set off the cost of moving elsewhere, like an insurance. Or you are smart and use commodity services.

>Users will invest their time and resources into using your product based on the promise that it’s free forever.

Unless you're a naive new entrant into the real world who doesn't know better, it's on you if you're fooled into thinking something is "free forever".

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Totally agree. In fact for myself, if a company is offering a free service, especially one that has significant cost on their end (bandwidth, compute, and storage are common cases), it's somewhat of a red flag to me. Too many things in tech have been "free" only to discover years later the negative consequences either for their business (which is ultimately bad for me as a user) or for society as a whole (which is also bad for me as a member of society). I much prefer transparent and sustainable business models that aren't based on some handwavy explanation that the free users will somehow lead to a bunch of paid users and that's how they'll make money Soon.

You resort to victim blaming.

Words should have meaning, you know?

If there is no such thing as a free lunch, then you should not be allowed to offer free lunches.

The saying goes that if you're fooled twice, you're the one to be shamed. The world isn't a nice place filled with unicorns and fairy dust, unfortunately.

Yeah, I disagree. It dosnt seem right to capitalize on another's mistakes by calling them out on it, and then offering a competing plan.

> Capitalizing on a competitors mistake is kind of slimy; calling out their poor business practices is not.

Agreed, except I can't find any examples of them calling out good business practices by their competitor, so I have to question whether it may be kind of slimy and disingenuous after all.

Don’t disagree, but even more important I like that it’s being called out. It’s the word “forever” in “free forever” that really irks me - very likely marketing was lazy (and deceitful, really, when you think about it) and calls it “free forever” without the business having had real serious conversations (even at the board level) about using a word like that and what it means to the business strategy. I’m not saying people don’t make mistakes but I’m also betting companies just sling words like that out there without a second thought.

Clearly whoever wrote it meant "indefinitely" and didn't realize that "forever" doesn't mean "forever until we decide otherwise".

i would rather say it's from the 'never let a competitor's dishonesty go unnoticed'

that you call it a 'mistake' speaks very poorly of you

> that you call it a 'mistake' speaks very poorly of you

There is zero need to launch personal attacks in this context.

this is not an accident; it is a fraud

the person lying about it by calling it a 'mistake' is engaging in precisely the same kind of violation of their own integrity as mattermost is

Yep:

1. See a competitor forced to drop free tier due to costs and VC landscape.

2. Get an avalanche of free users move to your platform.

3. Observe skyrocketing costs with meager impact on revenue.

4. Boot the free users. But hey, at least we did it with an apology. It changes everything, right?

I feel like if its 2023 and you're still gullible enough to fall for "free forever" bait and switch offerings from cloud providers then we need to have a frank discussion on neofeudalist late stage capitalism where a mainstay of its many successes in the digital realm is to literally trick you into consuming a product and pretend like it never happened.

It’s just straight–up fraud. People have been defrauding each other for a while now; I don’t think we need to invent hypotheticals like “neofeudalist late stage capitalism” to explain that behavior.

Also the old saying “if it’s too good to be true …”

If something costs money to someone else and doesn’t generate them any returns, you can expect it’s likely you won’t continue to receive the free service forever.

> neofeudalist late stage capitalism

how does that differ from "late stage capitalism" and/or "neofeudalist capitalism"?

The "late stage" meme smacks of unwarranted optimism. It presumes too much knowledge about future manifestations capitalism yet to unfold. I guess it ties into the notion of communism being a deterministic inevitability according to the science of socialism. Hubris, is what it is.

Neofeudalist late stage capitalism would have let boomers continue to have “free forever” plans while prices increased for everyone younger.

Boomers eventually die, or forget their pssword.

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