Ask HN: Freemium is doomed, why do many keep it anyway?

It’s 2022 and many services still offer free accounts, despite the many negative effects they have. If you search HN or the web in general, you barely find success stories around having a freemium model. In fact, it really seems to hurt most products as it lowers the perceived value. And because of having an endless trial, users seem to try much less to explore and make things work for them.

Here’s just one recent article about a company that added a free account retrospectively and pretty much ruined their conversions/sales for a while: https://recurly.com/blog/hard-lessons-learned-in-the-land-of-the-freemium/

Full disclosure: My startup is offering a free account as well, and we’re actively considering to remove it.