[acabal]

My site, Scribophile, was freemium from day 1 and was profitable from day 15. Freemium is still an excellent way to hook people on a service, because there's no risk to them. If they find your service truly useful, they'll pay without question.

I am, however, thinking of dropping the freemium model. Not because it wasn't successful, but because now that Scribophile has an established reputation, requiring an up-front payment would help keep out trolls or members who aren't interested in participating. The idea is to improve the quality of the community, not take a dive into my swimming pool full of gold coins. But I'm still pondering if that's the right decision.

[dangrossman]

I've been running W3Counter for around 8 years. A fraction of 1% of its users pay anything, while a significant number of people log in to the site multiple days a week for years. They obviously find it useful, but they have no reason to pay.

> If they find your service truly useful, they'll pay without question.

If they find your free service truly useful and it meets all their needs, why would they give you money?

[dchuk]

This is exactly right. By offering a truly free option (not a free trial) you're planting a seed in the user's mind that they can, in some way or fashion, get your product for free. In some form, your product is free.

This will shape them psychologically to be ok with the lesser free version in most cases.

Freemium does work, but not just because it gives users an opportunity to try something out with no risk. So do free trials. Very very few companies actually do freemium right, and would stand to benefit from a free trial instead (which doesn't have the same psychological implications that a truly free plan has)