We are gearing up for a release of a web application that offers both a limited free plan as well as a collection of more feature filled paid plans.
It seems that a common question we are getting from people such as investors is ‘Why on Earth do you have a free plan?’
To me it seems evident that the success of many popular web applications (Basecamp, Lighthouse, GitHub, etc) have been powered by this model that makes people not hesitate to give it a try, then come to love it so much they realise they need to have the features in the paid plan and start paying.
Certainly most, if not all, the online apps I pay for attracted me via this approach and I know happily pay for the services I love and need.
How would you pitch the usefulness of this approach to those who don’t immediately see the merit?
A crucial element of all of the successful freemium applications is that they create a dependency between the user and the application. If the usage/benefit level is high enough, the user will naturally want to become a subscriber to the premium services and gain access to additional features.
If your stakeholders are still unconvinced, nothing succeeds like success. Show them some past examples of applications that have done an excellent job of having people make the transition — GitHub and iShoot, for starters.