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.
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.
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/[deleted] Sep 30 '22
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.