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Starting Out: Should I Go Free or Paid?

I’m debating whether to launch my product as free or paid from day one. Free could help attract more users and build a community, but it might be tough to monetize later. Going paid could mean fewer users initially, but at least there’s immediate revenue.

For those who’ve been there, done that—what’s worked for you? Did you start free and switch, or go paid right from the start? How did that go?

Jon Besga
@heyjon

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Paid. But don't expect to have revenue immediately.

I would start with paid because it filters out noises (users who are not my target customers).

What you don't want is to spend time building features for them and in the end, can't find more people who would pay.

I've tested freemium, free trial and paid only for BoltAI. Freemium doesn't work, it literally 10x my troubles (from free users). Free trial kinda works but the conversion rate is way lower than paid only.

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Jon Besga
@heyjon

Hi Daniel, thanks for answering. Do you have the same opinion on projects that are unlikely to reach high levels of revenue anyway?

My current project is a Telegram bot to auto publish on Reddit using AI + Voice notes from Telegram. I'm modest in thinking that there won't be a huge audience for this kind of thing if it's paid. Of course, if it's free it will reach more people and be used more so I was thinking maybe the conversion rate ends up being roughly the same.

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Do you have the same opinion on projects that are unlikely to reach high levels of revenue anyway?

Yes but that's a bit pessimistic 😅. Any project may or may not reach a high level of revenue IMO.

Here is my thought process:

  • I need to form a hypothesis on how much effort needed to generate certain amount of revenue
  • Then I work backwards and validate the hypothesis
  • To do that, I would start with paid only because if I cannot convince even a few people to pay, I won't be able to convince 100, 1000 more. And in the end, all my efforts are wasted. I'd rather work on a different thing

From my experience, if you can convince 1 person out of 100 users who tried your product, it's likely a good product to pursue.

If you show it to 1000 people but none would pay then it's not a good problem to solve.

You can test both strategies. Make it paid only, but allow a small number of visitors to try it for free in exchange for feedback. This would filter the non-serious users who are not really having the problem you're trying to solve.

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Adithya Shreshti
@adithya

Wouldn't the answer vary based on what the product is and the price points?

Free, gets in the users but difficult to get them or their friends to pay later. Paid, could bring the right ones but could be challenge if it is subscription based product.

Some idea on what the product is, pricing that you are exploring could possible help you get better answers.

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Make it paid.

But, onboard 5 users for free, message them directly -- get a review from each so you can slap that on your homepage to help you convert new clients.

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The exact model depends very much on the service you provide.
Sometimes it makes sense to have freemium model, sometimes free trial.
And sometimes you ask to pay upfront.
But never just free.

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I mostly build for myself, my family and my friends, so I always have a small circle of people that use my apps for free. With this approach, I get lots of feedback and testing, without much stress.
Everybody else gets a nice pricing page with a credit card form to fill in 😉

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