| Thanks a lot for the candid feedback! It took us a while (and more than 60,000 free users!) to better understand our business metrics and see what our opportunities are until we've made these not always easy decisions. We also had a look at what our competing products are offering and many times it's nothing more than a free, very limited trial. Let me try to shed some more light about the free version:
- We've tried to avoid disabling common sense functionality just for forcing users to upgrade. Unlimited saving, unlimited exporting, unlimited pages and so on. Keep in mind that all mockups are throwaway artifacts that one can simply export and then safely delete their projects. It's a little inconvenient but it's not a finite resource that users can't replenish like in a case of a time limited trial. The premium features are typically wanted by business users who like a little more granular privacy settings, run multiple projects through their many customers or prospects or have extremely big projects that can benefit from productivity features like master pages. The premium users even avoid using our service for free if they don't have some confidence that someone is running a sustainable and trustworthy business in behind. - There is no data loss when you downgrade from a premium plan. The only thing we do is gracefully disable some premium functionality and restrict editing (not viewing) to projects created in the premium period. - All the users who signed up before got to keep their projects and the editing capabilities. Some of them have more than 150 huge projects. - On top of this, we are giving non profit and educational organizations as well as open source teams free premium plans. - We rarely say no to users asking for discounts or extended trials if they can't afford the premium plans. Our most important goal for us is to create a business we can grow so we can bring more value for our users - we really have a ton of great features in the pipeline that we're excited about. Time will tell whether we've made the right steps or if we have to make certain adjustments to our business. Thanks again! Edit: line breaks |
If you give public mockups a publicly accessible page and create a base representation that is indexable by Google, it might be an interesting source of additional incoming traffic (and leaves you open to become something like SpeakerDeck for Mockups.)