Good question: we mostly built Easyful to use ourselves, but if it gets a significant of usage we might build some more advanced pro features and sell those features as a paid tier upgrade, while keeping the base app free.
We've had success with that model before with Smallchat, a saas app we launched several years ago, and it's still going strong supporting millions of free users.
With low-operating-cost saas apps, you can get away with offering a pretty generous free tier. A small percentage of paid users can more than pay for your mostly-free user base.
> With low-operating-cost saas apps, you can get away with offering a pretty generous free tier. A small percentage of paid users can more than pay for your mostly-free user base.
Thats good to hear. Congrats.
I always wondered do low operating cost SaaS apps reach a point where the interest or subscription(s) for the paid plans outweigh the cost of running the free tier accounts? And how does one tackle that?
Do you have a blog or some stats to look at? I would love to read about this and this mission of yours.
I see many people suggest that there should be a small fee to cover the hosting costs, do you think such tactics lead to the race to bottom scenario where you can't really charge properly for the paid plan as the starter plan itself is under-priced?
I really wish Stripe would just make something like this. Just the bare minimum necessary to host Checkout for products entered in your Stripe dashboard. I wonder if they can’t due to some onerous clause in their agreement with Shopify.
Have you done a write it up English for how that works? Does stripe send emails and you just have the emails contain the content as attachments or straight text?
Definitely check them out - they're great. Easyful is just a fulfillment layer that plugs into Stripe payment links for emailing customers your content when they buy something.
We've had success with that model before with Smallchat, a saas app we launched several years ago, and it's still going strong supporting millions of free users.
With low-operating-cost saas apps, you can get away with offering a pretty generous free tier. A small percentage of paid users can more than pay for your mostly-free user base.