[vijitdhingra]

I love them! Free users are still validation that there is a demand for what you’re building. Ofc it might still be the case that most people aren’t willing to pay for your product, but you’re only going to find that out once you keep building.

This is exactly my approach with https://rockyai.me/ - chrome extension that lets you chat with any webpage using LLMs. I have zero paid users but a lot of my friends love the product so that’s still very satisfying!

[jainvivek]

I agree. But then there remains a doubt if product is only perceived as good-to-have, meaning less/no monetization potential.

Might be suitable for side projects, but not for full time entrepreneurship commitment.

[vijitdhingra]

True I get that. I think even for full time founders if you’re seeing crazy adoption by unpaid customers, then there’s something there. Once you have a bunch of free users it’s easy to expand into something that users are willing to pay for then to do that from scratch.

You don’t wanna be in a place where you’re seeing low signups overall and low usage even by free customers. It’s nice to be cautious of that but again all of these metrics are relative to what stage your company is at.

[jainvivek]

I am in agreement.

BTW cool extension. Gave it a try, and it provided a nice summary of this page as below.

"Overall, the community suggests that free users can be valuable, particularly for product feedback and potential future conversion, but caution is advised regarding long-term sustainability and expectations."

[realty_geek]

Are you able to get ai summaries of hn articles for free? I'm creating a tool for hn that could do with that.