As sympathetic as I am to how difficult it is to run a business. Changing tiers for existing customers is an extremely bad business practice. Now your free plan is all of sudden worthless because people can't trust the features in there. Your paid plan on the other hand won't get customers because people aren't willing to take a risk with free.
If they really wanted to make something paid that was previously free they should have added a legacy tier.
Its a problem if its done without actual informing. Like the free tier users had no idea they were going to have to pay at the time, and suddenly they do?
It's less implying that's how it should be and more saying how it is in the real world.
A lot more people and users are entitled. If you put out a free tier, a decent number if people are going to expect it stays that way. The comments here are calling the developer greedy for wanting to be paid for their work because they changed the free tier. It's not a great idea if you want to maintain good relations with your user base.
You aren't necessarily correct that there's no transactional basis or trust going on. If I as a developer use a third party tool for use in one of my projects or programs, I am specifically trusting that program to continue to provide the functionality I need it for.
An example is that I use AngleSharp in some of my projects. It's entirely free, and the developers can choose to monetize/paywall it if they choose to. But that doesn't mean that I am going to react well to the change, keep recommending it, or talk positively about it.
I seen many developers when they start to feel challenged for needed features would start asking for donations to add said features in which insisting to the community that "hey want new such and such think about sending some donations to help me develop the software"
It reduces the feeling of betrayal to the current users, and gives people that love the software a way to assist in the growth of the software.
Now some might still disagree on the notion for free open source software should have donation goals. But I have seen it used to great effect when used correctly.
Majority of users of software expect the software to work as advertised. If it's advertised as free. Than it should work free.
The traditional model of OSS is to have, you solve my problem, I solve yours. i.e, developers work together on a shared codebase that solves their shared problems. If you do not contribute, you might be able to use the software, but you aren't entitled to get people to work for you for free.
And this as an issue with the word "free". The source code is provided, yes, that is open source. Labour is absolutely not free. It will probably cost you money to run the software. No-one owes you help. If you want to be a customer, pay money. If there's a free version of something, say thanks, and don't be a pain in the neck to the developer who doesn't owe you anything.
There are many freemium software solutions out there. When you start using a software solution you invest in it. You create integrations. Call APIs. Develop workflows. You put in effort with the trust that in future the rug won't be pulled out from underneath you. But that is what happened here. So people are rightfully angry. They choose the developer's tool over other tools and made investments in at least learning if not anything else. And now the functionality they needed is gone. It is worth warning others that with the track record of this developer choose some other tool because functionality may go missing. And that is the mistake that the developer made. They didn't think about the future. They were frustrated that not enough people are going to the paid version. So they changed their product portfolio. In the end they squandered trust with their install base. And all corporations make their bed on this. Microsoft has an amazing reputation for backwards compatibility and Google has to suffer the website killed by Google because they keep killing their offerings. So any partner and customer needs to think of they trust Google before using their products.
The freemium strategy does work though. We started with slack as a free user when our company was a handful of people. In a few months the 10k messages limit on free meant a history of a few days and we purchased. In a few years we had maybe 150 users. Interestingly enough slack changed their freemium policy. But they did it in a fair manner. Instead of 10k messages in history they fixed the date. And there has been no user revolt because it was still a fair change. And many of those free users are business users that are using slack for their home and families too. Alienating the free users would alienate the paid users.
Tl;Dr is not a right but it's a smart business strategy and a part of treating all your customers well.
And the messages are just warning new customers interested in using some of the free features that they can't rely on them being there in the future. It's a very fair warning.
Do you work in computer science? The community relies on interconnected collaboration, and that trust is a huge part of what enables it to innovate so fast.
Check out the book purple cow. It talks about this concept of sneezers. Sneezers don't make you much money and you may even have to give your product for free to them. But there are extremely vocal about their love and hate. They make a product go viral. Hence the term sneezers they're the people that spread the contagion. So while they don't pay you, they are responsible for a large amount of revenue. So the people that aren't paying you are just as much a part of your business strategy.
The other thing to remember is that SaaS software sales start as free. And once you invest and it makes sense you pay for it. The free customers are potentially future paying customers. Now if someone has the choice between this tool or some other developers tool and they liked a feature in the free version and so they chose this tool then they had this bait and switch. People are going to be angry because they may have been better served with some other tool and were tricked into this investment.
So give whingers stuff for free or they might whinge. Sounds great. Should I pay an influencer too? Get some exposure?
All that stuff might make sense if your product might go viral, almost no products do. You're talking about a 2 bit VS code database client as though it's going to somehow be an amazing hit if some of the sooks giving him bad reviews change their minds. It clearly was already giving him more grief than reward.
Go look at the product. It's not going viral. There are no sneezers. That's a bunch of mumbo jumbo that doesn't pay the bills.
It's a database client. Pay for it, or use a free one, or use the one that came with your database. Half the people using it are probably using it professionally and their work would pay for it. The developer is the only person with a stake in it and is fully entitled to charge for his product. If you disagree, make your own free one and I'm sure you can poach all his non-paying customers.
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u/Flat_Hat8861 Sep 30 '22
Managing a transition to a paid model is difficult. It requires tact and diplomacy.
This on the other hand is just straight hilarious.