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Comment by tough | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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