Back
Question
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?
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?
👋 Join WIP to participate
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.
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.
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:
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.