| First, congratulations on building a product that is used by real users. The question you are now asking is: how to monetize it. My thoughts (as a bootstrapped SAAS founder): 1. Send an email/app notification to all your existing users mentioning that you are starting a Premium Plan from Feb 1st. I think you are on the correct path where you are making this a Freemium product so that it doesn't piss all your existing users off and is a slow transition to paid users. 2. Remember that some existing users will not like it regardless especially if you are taking away any features outside the Free plan that they are already used to. Manage this as needed. Be firm and polite and let the existing users know that some features will only be available in Premium Plan going forward. Make a few exceptions on a case by case basis for your top/best users who love the product. Talk to them directly. 3. Developer tools are hard to monetize because first, devs generally don't like to pay for shit (open source and ability to self create/host tons of free stuff) but if your product is really good, you have examples like Jetbrains etc to learn from. 4. Look at competitors in your space and learn how they are pricing things. Are you B2C or B2B or both ? Figure out who is your Ideal Client Profile (ICP) and find out how your competitors charge for similar customers if possible. Don't copy your competitor necessarily but get an idea. 5. Try to price based on value to the user which is extremely hard to determine early on. There is no magic answer honestly. You may have to experiment. You can either do Per seat model or fixed price model for up to x seats. I prefer the latter but you have to experiment honestly. 6. Your friend's idea is also worth a consideration where you don't offer anything for free but do it only going forward for new users. Grandfather your existing users if you can support it. It is difficult to run Freemium when you are small and have no team/resource/funding to manage the overhead of free users. Monetize as soon as you can being lean/small. |