Freemium

“I'm almost viewing the criteria more like freemium, because it kind of is freemium. You get one payment, you do get some money, but then they're freemium from then on.”

“You probably won't be able to do freemium because you can't kick your revenue super far out into the future, and you need to charge enough that you don't have to find a kajillion customers to make 10,000 dollars a month or whatever you need to live on.”

“A lot of our costs are within our freemium, not with our paid marketing, not with employees, not with marketing or sales budgets. It's with Freemium, because we view Freemium as actually marketing channel.”

“If you look at your overall marketing spend, your free giveaways, whether it's part freemium, whether it's discount codes or whatnot, has to be bigger than your paid marketing spend.”

“My angle was how freemium is great, but it's Rife with abuse, and you better have some good anti-spam algorithms like MailChimp does.”

“So you're talking about having, you know, a few 100,000 customers at the time after six years of business. And then within one year of launching freemium, we ballooned to a million users and it just kept growing exponentially after that.”

“And so, you know, I think there's a question of how it will play out. Will it just be a simple subscription or is there gonna be something more You know, freemium that comes along. I would bet on the latter. I would bet on the latter.”

“AI is also the rebirth of freemium, rebirth of free trial. We expect to try this stuff. For free and you've got to work around the cost.”

“Whenever Tetra switched it up, they decided, ok, we need to give a freemium motion for this product, And what you can see here is the number of signups for their switch, it started to skyrocket as soon as they made that switch. The number of, actually like, ne…”

“This is why freemium, it's not a never for bootstrappers. It's a by default, don't do it. What do you do if there are many free signups and not many paid conversions? Don't do freemium. Listen to this podcast and in general, don't do freemium.”

“You do see a lot of correlation between companies with lower price points and organic acquisition strategies like Quizlet going more freemium. And companies with higher price points that are much more dependent on paid advertising for subscriber acquisition go…”

“Freemium towards having a free and a premium version of your product to really work in any business, it needs to be that your free product is so good that people naturally have word of mouth around that product. And then to be economically viable, you have to …”

“If you have a high support sort of app or a high cost app to serve customers, then it's going to be really tough to do freemium.”

“They gave away the content. They were the first in-down marketers to really nail that. They were the first real freemium model. They were the first viral marketers.”

“Cause most, I'll just say most free offerings don't work. Like most people don't know how to do it and they kind of backfire and you like devalue your product and then you have a bunch of on and on and on.”

“Just bootstrappers using freemium in general usually means they don't know what the they're doing. Like that's been my experience.”

“Ruben Gomez has these four markers that I often quote, I actually put them in my book, of when freemium can work, and if you don't have all four of them, you probably shouldn't try freemium.”

“PLG is just freemium with better analytics.”

“Once you see that, what I typically try to do is each of those clusters is one of the plans, but I always remove one or two features that are very useful from one cluster and move it to the next as an excuse for people on like, okay, I start to use the product…”

“In order for that to be viable, it's gotta be a two to three percent conversion rate into paid. And there are businesses who of course achieve this and actually beyond I've seen it, but I would say most, most folks are much below that.”

“Most are below one percent that I see. I see quite a few freemium. There's a lot of tiny, there is a significant enough number of tiny C companies or companies that I've advised that have freemium plans or have had freemium plans, and I see the numbers on them…”

“We were one of the first SAS, SAS tools, and also first freemium tools, actually, in fact.”

“If I was bootstrapping this and actually trying to make money on it, freemium pushes out your revenue, right? It pushes out that revenue line. And if you have a bunch of funding, that's okay. And you can play the long game like Dropbox did and the other freemi…”

“And so we want to building a really robust in product trial program, many ways to flow into it, a guided experience. How can you make sure you're getting the value out of it? And that was probably, I mean, honestly, the single biggest thing we did on top of th…”

“All media models ought to move to freemium. It's as someone who's Been saying that for 15 years. I obviously agree with him there, but I think that's true in all formats, right?”

“Early on in the journey you know, some of the features were presented on a trial basis. You know, and then later on, like sort of the model was evolved from a trial basis time limited to a premium model that further sort of accelerated, you know, the growth fo…”

“So what you get quite quickly with these models is that you have web skill problems and small company income.”

“In, in SaaS, people try freemium, and it usually doesn't work. Like, if you're funded, you have buckets of money, you can do it”

“My recommendation is, is that you offer a freemium. A free trial is time bound. I don't know if you've experienced, but I certainly have. When you download something, you register, you play with it once. If the business then takes over different priorities, yo…”

“Customers who convert from freemium and become paid customers, their retention is typically about 10 to 20% higher than those who converted from a free trial or converted from kind of like a traditional sales process.”

“And then on top of that, NPS or CSAT, we measured it through NPS, is typically about double.”

“Personally, I'm in the camp of offering a reverse trial. Funky name. But what that means is offer a trial, but also offer freemio. Do both. And the reason why I like this is you get an opportunity when somebody shows up and says, Hey, I'm going to give your pr…”

“In general, I think freemium and also free trials tend to be most effective when there's something that the person who signed up can actually do on their own. Without being handheld. It doesn't have to be full functionality. It can be exploring a sandbox or a …”

“Freemium is all about getting that top funnel excitement, getting people to build habit formation. You're collapsing time to value. You're building habit formation. You're building all these champions to use your product. But the idea is to shepherd them along…”

“Anything that actually creates friction for my growth model, I'll probably gate it in the paid. Anything that promotes my growth model, I will put it into free.”

“Freemium was something that we kind of accidentally fell into, didn't really think much about it, and that turned out to be this thing that kind of, I think we were probably, you know, in tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of users at the time, and the…”

“As a founder, I think you should give up free at the, you should try to never give it up no matter what the team wants. Cause your product always gets clunky when you do.”

“For Sneak, the real drivers to move from free to a paid plan, for example, is when you want to secure business critical code. And you start having needs around governance and compliance.”

“It tends to be kind of like no man's land. Like who owns that? Is it marketing? Is it, if it's freemium, in my opinion, it should be marketing because freemium is a marketing tool, but like not everybody subscribes to that, right?”

“So I think that there is freemium case for everyone, especially if you are trying to land a customer that you might not even wanting to monetize at the beginning, by the way, because you need to have a very good strategy behind your freemium.”

“So I would say the biggest mistake is to think of freemium as just conversion rate optimization for paid.”

“Anything that actually creates friction for my growth model, I'll probably gate it in the paid. Anything that promotes my growth model, I will put it into free.”

“Obviously the best way to, like, win a market is just to, like, give it away for free, and then as you're learning about it, Then you just add paid products, monthly subscription”

“The freemium Model is something we tried way back in the day, and that did not work. As soon as we turned pricing off and payments, or sorry, charging everyone for the software, we had a whole bunch of emails going, oh great, now I'll start using it. So, big l…”

“If you're wondering about pricing and how to set it, and should you do freemium or not, a way to think about it is lifetime value of the customer. And this is something we learn from the gaming industry, where that's all they do.”

“My angle was how freemium is great, but it's rife with abuse and you better have some good anti-spam algorithms like MailChimp does.”

“So you're talking about having, you know, a few 100,000 customers at the time after six years of business. And then within one year of launching freemium, we ballooned to a million users and it just kept growing exponentially after that.”

“Freemium, obviously not a pricing approach, it's a marketing approach, and when you have freemium and someone signs up for your account, even if they're backgrounding it, they're, because they don't, I'm not paying for it, but then they remember in six months,…”

“Most B to B products are not freemium. Most of them have a free trial and then paid.”

“Our thesis was really obvious in retrospect that you could dramatically drop tack by using consumer-like marketing techniques, inbound marketing, content marketing, freemium to get to these people.”

“And whether you're selling, I think to the fortune, or you're selling to a two person startup, I think freemium's the way to go in almost any model because no one wants to talk to your sales rep anymore.”

“I think most of it came down to engineering resources. I hate to say it is that if it was just a flip of a switch in Stripe or something, I probably would have tried it, but it would have required a bit of work on the back end to get that implemented.”

“Even if the engineering time is only two, three, four weeks, then you get to the point where, okay, now we've done it and now we need to watch it for months because freemium doesn't convert in 30 days or 60 days, like you have months and months.”

“I honestly think that these are most often better conversion drivers than for example, limits. Like limits are good to bring someone to, like to force someone to the moment of having to make a decision. But I think what will really bring people over the hump i…”

“If you're gonna build a company and you know you want a free tier, be very thoughtful in the beginning about what goes into that free tier, because it's really hard to email your customers and say, hey y'all, super sorry, we're taking that free thing you love …”

“Freemium won't work for every company. Mostly because, like, what it requires is a very, very large market.”

“I think the only way to make freemium work though is people have, you have to be at the tip of their tongue when they talk about a space.”

“More than half our revenue is freemium these days, and so the product and the growth team within product really owns a lot of that”

“If your product is too complex, freemium doesn't work.”

“Eventually free tends to go away or become, you know, pretty crippled as the whole business evolves. But freemium can be so disruptive in these industries because if you're a large enterprise B to B software company, you're not going to be able to do this kind…”