The Psychological Difference Between Freemium & Free Trial Plans

http://www.layeredthoughts.com/startups/the-psychological-difference-between-freemium-free-trial-plans

by dchuk • 14 years ago

18 6 14 years ago

rymedia• 14 years ago

Got me thinking. Good post.

kaedus• 14 years ago

I like the distinction you make that freemium can work with certain businesses, but with others it doesn't make as much sense.

hackerzac• 14 years ago

Awesome stuff

uiri• 14 years ago

I don't think a comparison between amount of space usable/user (like in Evernote) and max words/day (your freemium?) is fair. If Evernote limited based on bandwidth/day or something like that or your model was total # of words a free account can use, then perhaps the comparison would be more fair. I think the problem with a max words/day is that the customer will limit their dependence to that maximum. You need the customer in a mindset where they'll only be concerned about the free plan's limits by the time they are dependent on the product.

dchuk• 14 years ago

right, I agree. I was using evernote moreso because 1) I was writing the post in evernote at the time so it was the first thing I thought of and 2) they have extremely low costs and require a decent amount of time to convince a user to convert to a paying user (they fully need to incorporate evernote into their workflow before converting).

My product (and this is in no way a comparison on product value to evernote) produces keyword analysis results nearly immediately, so the value can be realized a lot sooner and the user can incorporate my product into their workflow a lot sooner than something like evernote.

Also, as Evernote limits by total storage space in the free plan, it's comparable to what we used to do with total keywords for a free trial (before our freemium).

rogerbinns• 14 years ago

I'm still astonished at the sites that want contact information before they will tell you how their product works. HelpScout seemed useful for my startup, and I end up at a page where they will show me a video providing I supply a plethora of information. I waited for several minutes waiting for the email to arrive at mailinator before giving up.

The Psychological Difference Between Freemium & Free Trial Plans

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