Was more the 200-1,000% price increase I, and at the time work, objected to than the complete removal of a free entry / trial tier without warning.
They went from a typical SaaS freemium offering 3 or 4 priced tiers based on some level of use, and a small "forever free" demo tier for freelancers, right up to something like $199 or $250 a month for everyone.
Work immediately went looking for alternatives after that, so they lost a paying customer too. Did us a favour in the long run, and Basecamp left very much looking like last-decade's answer.
> They went from a typical SaaS freemium offering 3 or 4 priced tiers based on some level of use, and a small "forever free" demo tier for freelancers, right up to something like $199 or $250 a month for everyone.
I think it was $99
> Work immediately went looking for alternatives after that, so they lost a paying customer too. Did us a favour in the long run, and Basecamp left very much looking like last-decade's answer.
As Jason used to point out, it's perfectly OK for people's needs to grow and for them to leave and go to find someting else. The point of the product is to be simple and easy to use. It's great for small to medium sized businesses and it will likely never have feature parity with more complex project management software.
It is a feature that Basecamp doen't grow with you. It doesn't change out from under a company who like and want it to be the same. It serves a very specific market, and it's not Basecamp's responsibility to change as you do.
Difficult though your company may have found a price increase to $99 or whatever it was, I think "last-decade's answer" is off target. There are still a load of people using it, and every release only ever accellerated signups. See this older graph at the bottom of the page, each uptick in accounts is a new Basecamp release:
They went from a typical SaaS freemium offering 3 or 4 priced tiers based on some level of use, and a small "forever free" demo tier for freelancers, right up to something like $199 or $250 a month for everyone.
Work immediately went looking for alternatives after that, so they lost a paying customer too. Did us a favour in the long run, and Basecamp left very much looking like last-decade's answer.