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> If your free tier is too valuable people won't be compelled to upgrade, not valuable enough and people won't be compelled to give the product a try or stick around long enough to see or want the value of a higher tier. This is my experience when trying pick a read-it-later/bookmarking app. I’m currently using the free tier of raindrop.io and I don’t plan to upgrade at all. The only features I need is bookmark storage and highlights. I don’t think it’s too valuable, but it’s valuable enough to satisfy all I want from a bookmark manager. When I used Instapaper and Pocket in the past, because of their limited number of highlights in the free tier, I found myself peeking at the pricing page constantly and pondering whether I should upgrade. I didn’t have enough money to pay for yet another subscription, but the pressure to upgrade is there. I think I even subscribed for a month or two. My other thought is on the granularity of upgrades. Probably for simplicity, both for the users and developers, upgrades tend to limited to maybe 2-5 tiers with the base tier being free. Raindrop.io, Instapaper, and Pocket’s page on the premium tiers tend to list a lot of features but I find myself skipping through most of them. When I see that list, I know they’re charging me for the whole feature set when I only need one or two. As a result, I’m quite hesitant to subscribe to any of them. The ratio of need vs offered is important to me; if those features were compiled into a checklist and I only check one or two, then I’m out of the premium funnel. An example of decent intersection between what I need and what is being offered, is Tutanota’s private paid tier. Even though, there are still some features I don’t need, but the price is low enough that I can tolerate the feeling of not utilising my subscription enough. They also offer some other mini-upgrades and I can see why they’re an extension to the paid tier instead of being a part of it. |