[brianbreslin]

Has anyone found any good ways to force free users to upgrade to paid? i have a SaaS with a freemium option that has led to 2500 free users and only 1% conversion to paid. The support costs of the free users far outweighs the paid revenue. My guess is most of those free users won't upgrade, but has anyone had success in cutting the dead weight/forcing upgrades?

[ricardonunez]

Have you tried removing more features in the free version? It may be you solved the problem to almost all of them and they don't see a reason to upgrade. You need to figure out if is a pricing or a business model issue so you need to do a lot of testing. If you are talking about your WordPress Backup service, in one of my projects we provide WordPress services and I can tell you that most of my clients rarely get over 200MB. Also, if you have a dashboard or a newsletter, try running a special discount to older users (split test it). Hide the free version for a month or two and see if conversions increase.

[loceng]

Well, you'd have to change the freemium plan. I suppose at this point because something was promised, an expectation set, that you'll perhaps upset some people with changes. I would look to see who the top users are usage wise (perhaps cost wise on your part) and what features they use. I imagine there'd be numbers that you could group, perhaps even number of actions per month, etc..

If the top users under freemium no longer want to use the service if you start including them in a paid group, then you have a problem and might have to rethink pricing or the business model overall.