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Ask HN: Making a free site pay-for-only

12 pointswensing6 comments

Anyone have thoughts or links to thoughts on taking a site that is currently free and converting it into a subscription/pay-only site? People with experience preferably. :)

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Converting to a freemium model is the best way to do it.

Users don't pay for something after they've already been receiving it for free.

My experience shows that it's not true. It depends on how much people are devoted to your site/service/product. We at gtalk2voip.com turned 30% of our free services into paid for because we could not support more unpaid traffic. The result was not as bad as we expected: 1/10 users converted and paid for the services they previously used for free. Yet we received a lot many complaines and even threats. Of course you will be regarded as doing unfair and evil business, but as someone said: "no evil - no business". To soften the situation we kindly explained in every email why we were enforced to start charging for free services.

The overall results are: 1. Not so good publicity, we are no longer treaded as "cool service". 2. Increase in revenue. 3. Significant reduction in traffic and CPU load, hence save on expenses.

I believe meetup.com did this. They started free, but now charge $18/year (or something like that).

I believe the result is that now people consider it more reputable, since for any given group, someone somewhere is willing to spend $18/year for it. On the other hand, they probably lost many users.

They probably lost the inactive users. The ones who pay $18 a year will undoubtedly want to get their moneys worth and promote an active group. Great decision on their part.

i don't have specific experience, but i think your best bet would be to leave what is now free as free, and offer more features for $. convert to a freemium model. that way, you won't drive off the people who are using it for free, as they're going to be your best sales leads.

Supposedly it is still easier to convert a free model into a paid one than vice versa. People hate seeing something they place real value on be given away to others.

I would suggest keeping the core of what you have now free, and reserving some of the bells and whistles for paid accounts. Then to lure the free users (who are not completely disgruntled at this point) over to the paid side, add a great new feature or two.

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