This is by far the most common question we get asked, and this weekend I'm going to write a full length blog post about that decision. What might shock you even more is that we originally charged to pre-order the alpha version.
The short version:
- We needed to quickly figure out if we were building a product that people loved and thought was worth paying for.
- We're trying to build a product a small number of people love instead of one a large number of people like.[1] If someone loves a product, we've found that they'll pay for it.
- The support issues from growing too quickly would overwhelm us.
The long version involves us offering a traditional free paid beta for our first product: http://codeconnect.io and the lessons we learned from that experience.