[arnorhs]

Nice. Good job guys.

Interesting. They don't include a free/freemium account, only paid ones with a free trial. I have been wondering about this.

I've always assumed the best business model is to offer a free plan for everyone that is not limited to time but with fewer features or some other limit/constraint like number of users, amount of storage etc.

I wonder how the two models compare. Because I know a lot of people simply will not sign up for anything, even if there is a free trial. People just want something free they can start using and that they don't run into walls - a la Google Docs, Gmail, Basecamp free account, etc...

Any thoughts?

[alexsolo]

The main reason we haven't offered a perpetually free account is because we're a bit different than other SaaS companies: hosting isn't our only cost, we also have to pay for each phone and SMS alert we send.

The other reason is that we see PagerDuty as solving a real "hair on fire" problem, and we think if you're one of the businesses that needs this, it's reasonable to pay a certain amount for the service. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.

[arnorhs]

Ok, that's understandable. My default thinking would be: offer e-mail only notifications for free users, but you made a good point.

Your target audience/market is obviously not the casual user/blogger type so it makes perfect sense.

[lsc]

Might I suggest a free account that is limited to email alerts? It probably wouldn't cost you much, and it wouldn't cut into your 'business class' business... but it'd be a nice way for small timers to get a taste of your service monitoring their personal stuff (and then maybe recommend it to the boss)

[btilly]

I'd guess that anyone who needs to receive text messages already knows about the email to sms gateways that their phone carriers provide.

[koenigdavidmj]

But you don't really need this service for that. Nagios sends directly to those (just like any other email address).

Of course, the two-way SMS that lets you wake up the other guys if needed would break under this.

[lsc]

yeah, and many people disable those due to spam problems.

[dotBen]

I think it's a no-brainer for b2b SaaS.

PagerDuty starts at $12/month. For a personal account that's a huge chasm for me to cross, but for business it feels like nothing. It's probably not even my money.

In business you're just not use to getting much for free, especially service - my bank charges me to write a check, my ISP charges me more to get business DSL to the office than home DSL, etc.

Maybe we're just resigned to that, but having a no free account policy just rides that waves and presumably increases profits (forces conversions to paid, ensures no loss-making free accounts)

[justinchen]

It seems like more companies are moving from the freemium model to the free trial model. We recently switched over for http://www.theweddinglens.com/ and have been pleased with the increased number of conversions.

[arnorhs]

Interesting. Why did you make the switch? I'd love to hear details about that.

My thinking is that if more people are using the service, that also doubles as an advertisement if the users tell some of their friends, recommend to coworkers etc.

[justinchen]

Just because someone signs up for a free service doesn't mean they're going to use and spread it. When you get them committed through paying, then there's an even higher usage rate as they figure out the best way to maximize it.

Under the original free plans we saw a lot of people just signing up for free to play around with it, only to end up paying a couple weeks later. By making it an actual free trial system, we're able to put a lot more pressure and messaging throughout the upgrade process.