What are your views on 'Freemium' plans?

Freemium plans are ok, if they help with initial trial. In the long run, it creates a long tail of customers, with low engagement and not much value added either way. With many of the initial Freemium providers moving on to monetizing them, say Google, we are going to see less and less. I like Life TIme Deals (LTD) , which provides a better model for monetization and brings customers who are to some level serious about the money they are putting on the table.

I think it depends on your audiance. I feel like it works for the general public since most are not willing to drop a $1 on software regardless of other variables. And finding the small number of users who love your product so much they are willing to pay $$$ is hard for so many reasons.

There are so many SaaS applications with freemium features. The list is endless, some that i commonly use freely and still get a lot - Canva, Bitly, anyimage, prospectin, wordpress, iconfinder, the nounproject, zappier, sniply.io, Slack, calendly ... you see the point being, first of all too many tools to ease my life and then each of them do different things, and on none of them I have reached a stage where I felt the need to buy a subscription. While thats true we bought subscriptions for SendinBlue our email tool and Productstash.io our roadmapping tool within a month of using it as we instantly felt the need to take the paid plan. So yes it depends.

Here at www.qinaps.com we have a free and paid plan as well but instead of features, we use the restrictions on usage such as no. of blocks and workbooks that a free user can create. A heavy Qinaps user, who wants to create several workbooks and more than 200 blocks will eventually have to pay for it.

It depends on the current state of your product. If you are looking into more reach and awareness of product then it makes sense but for a limited time freemium plan. For example, if you have month based plan then go for 1 month. Any user engagement which can be leveraged can be done in this one month, any more than this only results in low engagement and extra pressure to get renewals. Secondly, if you think your product has good enough reach and awareness then it makes no sense to go for freemium plans because ultimately it leads to low conversion in renewals.