[fixie]

Taco is free for now, but we expect and hope to charge $5-$10/month at some point - cheap enough be a fantastic value for anyone who uses it even occasionally, but also not a free service that you rightly don't want. We're still figuring out when we should flip the switch but in the meantime, you are right, we need to do a better job of explaining possible future pricing.

[tudorw]

So the plan is to generate an initial spike in demand from a group of people marginally interested in something they can get for free, then alienate your core users, who would have been happy to pay from the outset, by introducing a fee, but only once the service is sufficiently overburdened supporting free users ? Well they say any plan is better than no plan... but....

Turn this upside down now, think about 100 users paying $50 a month for something they depend on, I bill $100/hr, if you can save me an hour a month I'm winning, once you have $5000 a month every month think about the next 100, keep going, sounds like your product has a use, don't make the free mistake, it's been highlighted here many times, good luck!

[tracker1]

+1 on this... I'd say do a 30-day trial period, then around day 25 ask for billing information... If you have tracking/analytics in place you know how many users are returning once signing up, and you have a better indication of conversion after use.

If you're going to have a free tier, I'd say limit it to N service integrations (3-5), but definitely make your core users paying close to the start.

If I had a need for something like this day to day, I'd definitely pay... Actually, I'd suffer for a while, then try it, then suffer again, then pay... but that's me and I'm kind of cheap/frugal. Most people will start paying once they see and feel the value.

Also, it's much easier to field requests from a few hundred paying users than thousands of non-paying ones. It's very hard to do conversion from free after the fact... many businesses have failed, burned, burned out, and left their best (paying) users in a lurch following this model.

[tudorw]

+1 for all that although I'd be tempted to get the billing info on sign up and offer a 'throwaway' good deal for the uncertain, so, say $50 a month, or try 10 days for $3