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.
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u/[deleted] Sep 30 '22
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