[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Freemium is doomed, why do many keep it anyway?
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       Ask HN: Freemium is doomed, why do many keep it anyway?
        
       It's 2022 and many services still offer free accounts, despite the
       many negative effects they have. If you search HN or the web in
       general, you barely find success stories around having a freemium
       model. In fact, it really seems to hurt most products as it lowers
       the perceived value. And because of having an endless trial, users
       seem to try much less to explore and make things work for them.
       Here's just one recent article about a company that added a free
       account retrospectively and pretty much ruined their
       conversions/sales for a while: https://recurly.com/blog/hard-
       lessons-learned-in-the-land-of-the-freemium/  Full disclosure: My
       startup is offering a free account as well, and we're actively
       considering to remove it.
        
       Author : cheerioty
       Score  : 11 points
       Date   : 2022-07-12 20:29 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
       | gravitate wrote:
       | I find it unfair that paid accounts essentially pay for the
       | freeloaders. This problem is mitigated by serving ADs to the free
       | users or selling their data. That model is broken in many cases,
       | so just don't do it. Offer strictly paid from the outset.
        
       | danielunited wrote:
       | Most people won't try a new product unless they can try it for
       | free (especially in a B2C market). Freemium creates more signups,
       | that's a fact. The challenge, now, is to convert those free users
       | into paying customers. But that's much easier to do than
       | converting someone who hasn't interacted with your product at
       | all.
        
       | MattGaiser wrote:
       | Probably depends on what "works" means. Signups can be important
       | for putting on pitch decks for example. Plenty of companies do
       | not have earning profit as one of their immediate objectives.
        
       | advisedwang wrote:
       | A lot of startups are more concerned around metrics that will
       | help secure future funding than actually being profitable (no
       | comment on whether this is wise or not). As such leadership is
       | usually very unwilling to turn away any potential active users,
       | even if that means some customers taking a free tier that would
       | otherwise pay.
        
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       (page generated 2022-07-12 23:03 UTC)