If a company gets rid of my free forever plan with them, there is a 0% chance that they're getting any money or positive word of mouth from me in the future. It's incredibly scummy behavior.
If you're not willing to actually offer it forever, just call it a free plan instead of lying about it.
Still a net gain for the company. Getting something from them for free means you are costing them money. And I would bet your word of mouth was also worth negative dollars to them since you're going to be telling people about the free tier.
> And I would bet your word of mouth was also worth negative dollars to them since you're going to be telling people about the free tier.
The whole point of having a free tier is to onboard customers and then upsell them to a paid tier. If a referral is costing them money, they are missing the point of a free tier.
Google Workspace...the one that they let us beta test for free starting like a decade ago? they rolled out a free opt-in after announcing the move to discontinue the free service. here's a cropped screenshot i just took of my control panel:
But for company use, I'd rather pay for something I'm happy with using personally or have had good experiences with in the past, rather than rolling the dice on something unknown.
During early development you get feedback (both actively and passively), and if you’re raising funds it gives you inflated metrics and indication of PMF.
At later stages those are less valuable, so they might not be getting value out of it anymore.
Most of my recommendations for services to use come from my friends who have either used that service on a free plan, or a paid plan. It matters very little in terms of the network effects of their service whether or not you're on a "free plan". See GitHub's free subscriptions of CoPilot for open source contributors.
There could still be word of mouth that leads to paying customers. Or circumstances change and the paid plans are worth it for previously free customers.
> If a company gets rid of my free forever plan with them, there is a 0% chance that they're getting any money or positive word of mouth from me in the future. It's incredibly scummy behavior.
I'm sure they are also willing to give you back any money you have paid to date...
> I'm sure they are also willing to give you back any money you have paid to date...
A "free plan" is one thing, and what you say is totally fair for that.
A "free forever plan", though, contains a promise. And whilst we know it isn't literally true (companies die or pivot, takeovers happen, economies crash etc), there's an element of broken trust when "forever" is not only dropped but the communications around it are silent or misleading about the loss.
I've no skin in the game (or axe to grind) but it feels like that might be the crux of the issue - it's a question of integrity when communicating.
you’ve never made a mistake in your future predictions? youve never committed to something you couldnt deliver?
i understand the outrage but remember the people on the other side of that screen are just humans too. many things dont turn out the way the initial intention was (im not excusing this specific instance, im just hoping for less vitriol when i someday make some over promising mistake in future). let he who is without sin…
1) it's not people, it's a company. They're 2 different things. People have consciences and families. Companies are beholden to shareholders. People can find a different job if their company fails. I don't think we need to be forgiving to companies. They're not forgiving to people. They act on policy.
2) While I admit that I'm guilty of it too, overpromising is pretty destructive. It causes you to have to work harder and give stuff for free to deliver, but that in turn causes other people to have to do that too. If overpromising is very common, then that would mean the market is artificially lower, which is why you have people scrambling all the time doing quick and dirty fixes for everything and lots of companies with horrible work-life balance. It would probably be good for the industry if overpromising were a shameful taboo and not just a simple slipup.
A little while back I went looking online to find the origins of “a corporation is a person”.
I’m no lawyer… so feel free to correct me if anyone is… but it looked like the origins of a “corporation is a person” came from simple administrative needs. That it would be unrealistic to make someone indivdually sue each shareholder separately instead od bundling them into one suit and treating the corporation as “one person”.
Sure seems like we’ve lost the plot then. In addition to the situations pointed to above, a corporation doesn’t sign up for the military draft, get taxed on their gross income, pay social security, do jury duty, vote in election, etc, etc, etc.
In Belgium administration for example, you usually call a company a “moral person” (as opposed to a “physical person” for humans). This is used to know who is the “person” on the end of various contracts, tax filings, ownerships etc
That’s fine, you don’t have to love a corp like they’re a human, or empathize, but they’re definitely going to screw up in a human way because they’re made of humans, so customers are going to be disappointed if they expect too much.
The earlier comment called ending free lifetime updates/service “incredibly scummy behavior.” That seems way off to me. In the pantheon of bad corporate behavior that’s not even a 1 out of 10 in severity. It’s “disappointing behavior” but not surprising or IMO particularly bad. None of us is entitled to free service from others. That’s just not how the world works long term. Nice if you can get it but don’t be surprised when it ends.
By the way I think you’re right that it’s destructive behavior - one company does this, competitors face pressure to do the same. But I am not sure acting like it’s a shameful moral outrage to overpromise is a good solution. The problem isn’t morality, it’s bad incentives, with “10X or bust” VC thinking at the root. I don’t hate the players I hate the game.
I don't think they screw up in human ways though. That's not a human way. A human freelancer or friend wouldn't get away with just ghosting like that after promising something. They would have to own up and face the music. They screwed up in an institutional way: by changing policy when it suited them, and trying to cover their tracks.
What? Humans get away with crap like this all the time. You’ve never had a friend promise to show up to something and then not show up? Or promise to return a tool after borrowing it and not do it?
Or a freelance contractor/handyman only do half a job?
I agree that there are much worse ways that corporations can be scummy. This is pretty low on the list of priorities compared to environmental destruction, funding warlords, etc. Also, I agree that people don't have a right to infinite free labor.
And as for human flakiness... yes it's there. It feels different somehow but I can't put my finger on it. The last example feels most relevant... the contractor finishing half a job. That would be considered pretty shady, and I think for good reason.
Regarding the first point: you're right in the context of large corporations (such as Mattermost). We also have sole proprietorships, which are strongly tied to the owner.
True, and even in the case of larger corporations, they can act with a little humanity when they have a strong leader with lots of leeway.. but then they don't get the scaling benefits of relying on systematic policy and can make more errors.
"Forever" is such a word which you should nit utter lightly, especially in the context of a service commitment.
I see that mistakes are made, and they need to be fixed when they become obvious (usually other people have to fix them than the people who made them). But there's no expectation that making and fixing such a mistake should be free, without impact on reputation and customers' goodwill.
If a company states something is 'forever' or 'unlimited' they should be held to exactly that offer. Companies should not be able to use very appealing language and then just say "but obviously we didn't really mean forever!".
Using language with a specific meaning with no intention to actually honor what you're offering is fraud.
if you had read some of the previous thread you might have picked up on the subtle distinction that some of the people being dinged for saying Forever probably meant forever when they said it but then ran up against reality.
True if you say forever you should be held to it, on the other hand if someone says forever to you you should hopefully be clever enough to realize they can't do it because forever is unknowable.
But once again I seem to have run up against the great moral pillars of HN for noting that you should not believe forever when you hear it because well, whatever.
You should be able to trust a contract to mean what is written. It is not my responsibility to ensure that the company is able to hold their end of the bargain. If they at a later point find themselves unable to hold their end of the bargain, they should face consequences for breach of contract / false advertising and those consequences should be greater than the expected gain from walking back on the contract. Otherwise all contracts become worthless which serves nobody.
IANAL, but for a contract to be legal, at least in the US, it requires consideration from both sides, which means both sides have to give up something. What consideration is given from the free user?
> IANAL, but for a contract to be legal, at least in the US, it requires consideration from both sides, which means both sides have to give up something. What consideration is given from the free user?
What "free" user? Didn't they paid a fee to get app with forever updates? So they given cash? When it comes to contracts what matters is how much money they can spend on lawyers/experts and how much political clout they have.
Again though, you're arguing that the company offering 'forever' and not delivering it should become the customer's problem.
If the company doesn't want to 'come up against reality' they shouldn't make offers they can't deliver.
All I'm saying here is that the customer should come first, even if the company finds it hard or costly to do what they said they will. That isn't controversial.
Of course it's not forever. The company isn't going to be around forever (or even 100 years in all probability). The software isn't going to make any sense probably in 10 years. So no a company shouldn't make those sorts of statements and, if they have lawyers on staff, probably won't. But any claim that a product will be supported "forever" is just as clearly untrue as the claim that some non-trivial software product has no bugs.
Why is it my responsibility as a consumer to know that "forever is a word that should never be expected to hold", rather than the business's responsibility to know that "forever is a word that should never be [promised if it cannot] be expected to hold"?
I guess my eyesight must be failing me, or my reading comprehension and memory because I keep looking through what I said and I don't see a mention of responsibility anywhere.
I would say it's not any consumer's responsibility to know that but when it does not hold it may be expected that the cynics who did not expect it to hold point sideways and chuckle because believing "forever" when you hear it is a bit too doe-eyed with wonder, even though you should probably be recompensed in some way.
Fair enough. I understood the "forever should never be expected to hold" to be justifying the use of the word by businesses which do not necessarily intend to follow through, rather than a cynical resigned acceptance of the fact that they probably won't.
In other words, I thought you were expressing the idea that businesses offering "forever" and then pulling back are not to be held accountable because that's business, rather than what (I now think) you meant, that was that one should never trust a business ostensibly offering something "forever".
You must have missed this part if you read the article:
> But Mattermost is breaking the “free forever” promise made to its customers, and without any acknowledgement or apology. The “free forever” note was quietly removed from Mattermost’s website in the month leading up to the announcement, and is never mentioned in the email Mattermost sent to affected customers. Surely, one can expect better than that from a company whose stated principles include “customer obsession” and “earn trust”.
But why should we accept that such statements are bullshit? It’s because companies are so cavalier with their advertising language and we let them get away with it.
Because there is a history of businesses making statements that turn out to be nothing more than marketing slogans.
I'm not defending them or suggesting you shouldn't be angry about this; merely suggesting that being cynical of such claims at the outset is advisable.
This seems to be the crux. Very few people would expect forever to mean literally forever, but when it is taken away it should be acknowledged (and ideally, but optionally, explained). It should not be ignored as if it never existed in the first place, just for the sake of reputation.
You would deserve ALL the vitriol. That's the risk you take. I mean, vitriol is just words and you will live. If anything, as a lawyer, I might go looking for "did they create a contract" as well.
But tech companies promising free things and going back on them, or delivering poorly, is probably literally the worst thing about tech these days.
If you are making something as a branding or contract, then you better keep it. People break promise every time and not like all of them are evil, malicious, or should go to jail. But a bank failed to pay back frequently will definitely found themselves doubting where the customers go.
It's not because they are evil persons. It's because when that promise and trust is broken, I need to severely rethink about other thing. If they ever comes out with NPO financial report or even a formal apology, I'm fine - I mean I'm mad a bit, but not angry. They tried something and it doesn't work, like every success story (or failure story that no one asks) things do go south. But if the solution of the company is secretly hiding it or even publicly denying it (not in this case but that kind of stuff did happen before), then they are not getting a penny from me.
As making cloud storage free for everyone without ads forever is not quite possible nor sustainable, unless you farms telemetry for money (GDrive, dropbox with insane telemetry found recently). It is purely understandable and predictable the business model will die some day, and it's definitely not to blame them for not being able to keep this forever. This is not QE4 and money is not printed in house. But apology and even a changelog is free and it definitely cost more to try to hide it then be honest with it. That's a misdemeanor to perjury for me.
> you’ve never made a mistake in your future predictions? youve never committed to something you couldnt deliver?
I think it's worth noting, what incentives are at play here. It's not a neutral mistake: By claiming "free forever" you are heavily frontloading your adoption/marketing and I have to assume you are not just doing that by accident.
So unless, in the worst case, you are ready to fail your company over keeping the promise, just don't ever claim "forever".
But companies love to put labels on things like this with seemingly little thought.
Offering something for free with the 'forever' label on it is I believe deliberate - trying to distance themselves from others who have offered a free plan, but either pulled the rug once they got popular, or snuck in conditions or time limits.
If they had withdrawn the free plan from new customers, but grandfathered in existing users they would have kept their promise and earned at least some good-will.
you’ve never made a mistake in your future predictions?
Sure, but I own my mistakes and accept that it's on me to live with the consequences. When a company axes its "free forever" accounts it's passing the consequences of the mistake on to the users. I contend that is making the outcome of the mistake worse rather than better. I don't see how you can argue it's a good thing that people should just accept.
Either offers and contracts are valid or they are gibberish. Anyone who is continuing to honor them as valid loses out in a system where others can promise the impossible and not suffer consequences.
If you offered impossible lifetime deals you should have gone bankrupt before the honest diligent company that did their math and then didn't, not had a decade of eating their cake.
We can't take back all the benefits of fraud, but we can force companies to burn everything to meet obligations so that future ones are less inclined to put on rose colored glasses and start making fraudulent offers.
Never sail in ship guided by an idiot Captain!, well it may not sink, but if it was to, than your proababilty of drowning increases many fold!
Companies who make such outrages plans/claims to attract more user (and hence cash flow), can't simply be just forgiven, people invest there time and money on such things. A single mistake (or eliberate plans) by such company waste thousands of hours of valid time/money of users who placed their faith in the claims/plans. There is no excuse to lies,which waste time/money of people.
> you’ve never made a mistake in your future predictions? youve never committed to something you couldnt deliver?
I do my outright best not to avoid over-promising, since over promising can cause harm to others. Consider two parties here: the customer and the the competition. The harm to the customer is rather obvious since the terms have been changed for them. It would manifest itself in higher costs, the need to alter their work, or both. One could argue that they should not have depended upon a free tier, but ... the same cannot be said for the competition which was offering a real product. They have to deal with (potential) customers who were pulled away by a snake-oil salesman. While my wording is likely unduly harsh. Given how quickly the changes were made, the free tier was likely a poorly thought out plan rather than a malicious one, it is important to remember that an attempt to draw in customers is often intended to pull them away from others. You better be sure you can live up to your word.
> you’ve never made a mistake in your future predictions? youve never committed to something you couldnt deliver?
> i understand the outrage but remember the people on the other side of that screen are just humans too. many things dont turn out the way the initial intention was (im not excusing this specific instance, im just hoping for less vitriol when i someday make some over promising mistake in future). let he who is without sin…
If you can't deliver what you promised then giving all the money back or portion depending on percentage completed is only ethical solution. You are not entitled to other people money because they fell for your lies.
Otherwise I have "electric" car rolling down the hill I'm willing to sell to you.
It should be illegal to offer 'free forever' plans and tiers. No company is actually capable of delivering on that promise. It's not a mistake if its blatantly obvious at the beginning that your company is unlikely to last forever.
> It should be illegal to offer 'free forever' plans and tiers. No company is actually capable of delivering on that promise.
It is perfectly possible if your marginal cost is low/zero. The value of a product has nothing to do with its cost. The paying customers on higher tiers will easily subsidise the free for life plans.
If you have no paying customers, well, then your product is at the end of its life anyway.
I, for example, am a paying customer of JetBrains tools and all I get is to be able to download updates. It would probably cost them a few cents a year if they stopped charging me and provided updates for free, forever.
> No, simply because no company or product is going to be around "forever". It's an impossible promise.
Real world customers are actually smarter and they don't take words literally. They know that contracts don't mean anything once one of the parties is not around.
By the same logic making annual contracts should also be illegal because there is no guarantee that your company or product will be around until next year.
> They know that contracts don't mean anything once one of the parties is not around.
Contracts also mean little if no money changes hands and both parties have zero liability. They mean about the same as the pinky promise made in first grade to be friends 'forever'.
doesn't seem like much of a loss to lose that "business":
a user who hops from free service to free service, and is so opposed to spending money that they will badmouth any business that wants to actually charge for its service.
If a company is happy to lie to and disregard those customers, why offer a free plan in the first place? It makes no sense. People who are willing to pay will notice this behavior.
Not sure I totally agree. Capitalizing on a competitors mistake is kind of slimy; calling out their poor business practices is not.
Users will invest their time and resources into using your product based on the promise that it’s free forever. Changing your mind later puts the burden on them to figure out how to move forward.
Even if I was a free user and I was considering a paid plan that type of dishonesty would make me move to a competitor. What else will they change their mind on? No thanks.
Yeah, not sure about this either. What it does do is to make me think about the free tier for apps I use, and then wondering what I will do if that free tier becomes more expensive than the value I get out of it.
This reminds me of the love/hate relationship I have with the Fusion 360 free tier, and maybe even some paid tiers where lifetime is not really lifetime.
Or tell them it may stop being free in X years, where X is large enough that it’s aways off but close enough that some decide to switch. And then stop new signups but never actually take away the free plan.
The “good work Wesley, I’ll probably charge you in the morning” plan.
Agreed. Does anyone have any insight as to why companies fail to do this? Naively as a non-{marketing,business development,COO} guy, I feel like the cost to keep delivering those services ought to pale in comparison to the value of having even a tiny number of those customers go into a forum like HN or Reddit and say "we've been there since the early days and we're really happy".
Sure, it's inherently a tech/financial/support load to maintain a special category of customer, but I don't see it as fundamentally any different from a successful company managing the discontinuation of a popular product. You cut off new customers, let attrition take its course for the existing ones, and take your lumps from any high-value/high-touch customers who drag their feet on moving to the new thing. It's work, but so is climbing a ladder. Do you want to elevate the company or not?
> Does anyone have any insight as to why companies fail to do this?
It’s really hard to quantify the positive benefit of letting them stay, and really easy to quantify that letting them stay is going to cost us $500/month forever.
Turnover still applies to the “free” users. If the burden is simply so high the company is going to fail otherwise then do what you got to do, but don’t assume grandfathering people in means spending X$/month for the next hundred years or anything.
Sometimes it's also abuse too depending on the product. If you have a product that can get twisted into a phishing mechanism or injecting crypto miners somehow that can be the worst for whack a mole. I still think in many cases this is solved by just discontinuing new free plans and dealing with the population you already had.
> let attrition take its course for the existing ones
The reasoning breaks down here. There's not likely to be a lot of attrition for a free product compared to a paid one. It costs nothing to continue and costs time to cancel.
> Capitalizing on a competitors mistake is kind of slimy; calling out their poor business practices is not.
Agreed, except I can't find any examples of them calling out good business practices by their competitor, so I have to question whether it may be kind of slimy and disingenuous after all.
The saying goes that if you're fooled twice, you're the one to be shamed. The world isn't a nice place filled with unicorns and fairy dust, unfortunately.
Totally agree. In fact for myself, if a company is offering a free service, especially one that has significant cost on their end (bandwidth, compute, and storage are common cases), it's somewhat of a red flag to me. Too many things in tech have been "free" only to discover years later the negative consequences either for their business (which is ultimately bad for me as a user) or for society as a whole (which is also bad for me as a member of society). I much prefer transparent and sustainable business models that aren't based on some handwavy explanation that the free users will somehow lead to a bunch of paid users and that's how they'll make money Soon.
Don’t disagree, but even more important I like that it’s being called out. It’s the word “forever” in “free forever” that really irks me - very likely marketing was lazy (and deceitful, really, when you think about it) and calls it “free forever” without the business having had real serious conversations (even at the board level) about using a word like that and what it means to the business strategy. I’m not saying people don’t make mistakes but I’m also betting companies just sling words like that out there without a second thought.
I feel like if its 2023 and you're still gullible enough to fall for "free forever" bait and switch offerings from cloud providers then we need to have a frank discussion on neofeudalist late stage capitalism where a mainstay of its many successes in the digital realm is to literally trick you into consuming a product and pretend like it never happened.
It’s just straight–up fraud. People have been defrauding each other for a while now; I don’t think we need to invent hypotheticals like “neofeudalist late stage capitalism” to explain that behavior.
Also the old saying “if it’s too good to be true …”
If something costs money to someone else and doesn’t generate them any returns, you can expect it’s likely you won’t continue to receive the free service forever.
The "late stage" meme smacks of unwarranted optimism. It presumes too much knowledge about future manifestations capitalism yet to unfold. I guess it ties into the notion of communism being a deterministic inevitability according to the science of socialism. Hubris, is what it is.
For 25 years, Image Line have been shipping the FLStudio DAW as a one-off purchase with free lifetime updates, and since I've been receiving those updates for a significant chunk of those 25 years since I bought the Producer Edition, it seems pretty sustainable.
In their words "Why? Because we believe you should get the program you paid for, bug-fixed and updated for as long as we develop FL Studio." [1]
One time payment and forever free updates means the product dies when the growth stalls OR they create other services around it and sell those.
It can work for some products and often those turn into freeware once they find a subscription or consumables for which the users are eager to pay for.
It also means that the company is incentivized to continually add features that will lead to new sales, rather than improve existing features to make the product better for previous purchasers.
I want to subscribe to pay for the products I depend on. Because I want to be an important stakeholder in product decisions. I do not want the company to consider me as sunk profit and a drag on expenses from here on out.
> It also means that the company is incentivized to continually add features that will lead to new sales, rather than improve existing features to make the product better for previous purchasers.
How? ImageLine and its competitors tend to offer free trial versions of their software, so they're not simply selling feature lists. Users can try out and feel the software, so there is an incentive to refining existing features, because those fundamentally form the basis of whether a potential customer buys or not.
Perhaps you could add more features to try to convincing users that already have a a DAW-of-choice to switch to FL Studio, but I think you overestimate how big this market is compared to the constant stream of new bedroom producers. A DAW can be a relatively big investment for a bedroom producer, not only in terms of money but in time to learn, so the cost to change your mind is high.
You have a "fully up to date" product until an operating system upgrade breaks it or there's a security vulnerability that really does need to be patched.
Although I sold a small-time file manager shareware product for a number of years, I tend to agree that forever upgrades isn't a great model in general. Especially if sales are trailing off over time, I have zero incentive to provide updates/patches especially if some major change is needed. In my case, I decided that a significant upgrade would require major changes and it wasn't worth the effort. Not sure it would have been even with an upgrade fee but certainly wasn't absent one.
>You have a "fully up to date" product until an operating system upgrade breaks it
The amount of Windows executables that cannot work after upgrades is absurdly low, and is often obscure software that either relies on internal behavior or simply hasn't been tested and approved on newer versions by The Powers That Be. MacOS tends to be dreadful on backwards compatibility, but that's more due to Apple's clown-ish behavior when it comes to backwards compat. As for linux, well, welcome to LTS life.
> there's a security vulnerability that really does need to be patched.
So, for an extremely small minority of programs, it's a problem. Unless there's an RCE in FL Studio, you won't ever need to upgrade it. And unless FL Studio takes in unsanitized output from the outside... yeah, no, not a problem.
Buying a dollar for pennies always feels good, sure. However, using products of unsustainable businesses means you can't depend on it. For some products that's not a problem, for others it can become huge problem when you find yourself locked in maintaining old version of an OS or a companion software. The effect of not getting updates is very pronounced in professional or industrial software where to this day some people are forced to secure floppy disc supplies and deal with Windows XP.
In college we had a lab of really old PCs which run a very old version of AutoCAD because the school purchased that version and it wouldn't run on modern machines, I was told. There was another lab in similar situation with Adobe products.
After the subscription model raised to prominence, people get the latest version of the software and pay only as long as its useful for them. It's a win-win because the developer has the incentive to provide the best possible service in order to retain customers.
That’s really not about the business though. People hate on new versions all the time if a behavior or UI changed, this is old as the days of software.
Some software companies handle it better than others.
Therein lies the problem. Growth is always the goal until everything blows up.
It’d be great sometimes to switch from grow to sustain. Instead of going after the next 1000000 customers with new features, just stop and focus on making existing features amazing for existing customers.
No new markets. No doubling ARR. Just chill, make stability the goal.
It doesn’t even work for internally-capitalized companies. For one thing even companies focusing exclusively on serving existing customers will have some churn and that will necessitate new sales to offset the losses.
Sales teams generally work on commission so to keep good sales people you have to develop new features to compete
Reaper does the same thing: ridiculously inexpensive and insanely well built, one edition, updates every couple weeks, supports an SDK, I could go on.
I think it’s also freemium with a nag screen.
How this is sustainable is beyond me, but I’m thankful every day there are still some SW companies who do amazing things without sucking the life out of their customers at every turn.
FL Studio lives off plugins that aren't free. Still, it's great that the producer edition is free forever, but one might need to pay them from time to time when falling in love with some new sound ;-)
Their platform has a neat feature: you can use all the plugins they sell, but you can save projects using only the ones you've bought. It's a more granular version of the crippleware approach to licensing, and yeah, as you say, it can be really effective if you've worked a new sound into one of your compositions.
(It's been a while since I fired up my copy, so this might have changed.)
I too am a long time owner of of FLStudio. However, I have noticed that many new features added to FLStudio are not added to the base program, but rather sold as an add-on.
Perhaps the free lifetime updates plan is the reason for this.
I wonder if they ever compared the price of AWS hosting and just renting a rack at a colocation facility.
One way of thinking about this is that "free" isn't "enterprise" and while you would love to have them convert, hosting free users on a rack with a 500MB Cogent IP transport contract can be had for < $2K/month. So $24K a year. Is it a "teir-1" data center? no. Does it have failure redundancy? no. Is there a risk of data loss in the event of a power failure? yes. But all of those things are what drive the costs up and are what make the "paid" plan, worth more than the "free" plan. Would it be good enough for people? Absolutely.
I'm pretty skeptical of this approach. There are generally two reasons to offer free tiers:
1- hope users will upgrade to paid plans
2- hope free users will spread name recognition through word of mouth to people who will pay
Generally speaking, "free tier" users are the worst- they demand more from support and expect to give nothing in return. Very few transition to paid users.
What happens if you give your free tier users a degraded experience compared to paid users? They'll complain that your service is slow, loses their data and is a terrible product. You're shooting yourself in the foot, because you'll get no fewer upgrades and a terrible reputation.
Even if you try to communicate that the free tier doesn't have the stability or performance of a paid plan, if I experience the free tier and am unhappy with it, you've raised the bar considerably for meeting my expectations for the paid plan. I'm more likely to pay for a competitor than pay for your product in the hopes that it'll improve.
No, I don't think that's right. I can name other scenarios:
1) I am at a megacorp. I want to rapidly prototype without going through purchasing / finance / bureaucracy.
2) I have a personal and a work account. I learn something on weekends on the free tier and use it at work.
Both of those have happened (with me, as the user), and led to millions of dollar of business to cloud vendors. In the case of #2, the cloud vendor has no way of knowing that the conversion came from a free tier. In the case of #1, I'm not even sure they tracked it.
I am astronomically less likely to use tools without a free tier, at the very least at the level of validating that the product is useful, and ideally, at enough of a level to get started.
The AWS free tier is almost exactly the right level, but would do better without expiration. It's not costly or usable to build anything significant in the free tier, but more than enough to get started. The one-year limit is an issue, since when I switched jobs, it was no longer usable.
Other scenarios I've seen:
- Early-stage startups. It's dirt cheap to offer free tier to someone with O(0) users, and most stay there. Those that hit the exponential growth curve more than make up for it, and won't have capacity to migrate. AWS courts these hard.
- Education. What people learn in school, they take to their jobs. Especially engineering software companies make hard plays here.
All good points, but I'll add that "free trial" is a very good hook, "free forever" is not.
So offering free trial periods (like AWS do for a year) is very effective, and very measurable.
Free Forever is clearly not self-sustaining, do one of us will inevitably be disappointed eventually, and i suspect that'll start by being you and end up being me.
I wouldn't make categorical statements like that. Free forever (without the promise) has worked well for many businesses, for github/gitlab, to Google, to quite a few others. A few models which have worked:
1) Limited to a single user (no team use);
2) Not have appropriate compliance for corporate use;
3) Limited enough to be free to provide and not viable for any real-world use (e.g. 15 minutes / 100 API calls per month);
4) Incompatible licensing (AGPL/proprietary dual licensing is an example);
5) Making everything on the free model world-public (MANY rapid prototyping tools do this)
The goal is usually to be adequate for nights/weekends personal projects, open-source projects, and internal prototyping, but to require customers who can pay to need to pay. How you do that depends on your business.
The higher-level point is that working from categorical points is not good business strategy. As with any tool, something like free, free forever, etc. can be good or bad, depending on how it's used, and requires a careful case-by-case analysis. If you remove tools from your toolchain based on categorical guidelines, you will be at a disadvantage.
The nice piece about the "forever" is that people change jobs every 3 years. I exhausted my trial tiers at several vendors in my first job (several of which switched to paying). Guess who's not being experimented with in my current job? All the vendors whose free tiers I exhausted, but whom I didn't adopt.
> I have a personal and a work account. I learn something on weekends on the free tier and use it at work.
But have you ever used some free tier, found it to be flaky or buggy and then still continued to upgrade to the enterprise tier because they promise you the paid tier is less flaky than the free tier? I wouldn't believe them.
#2 basically counts as a word of mouth reputation. #1 is essentially an upsell. Your other examples are the same, just the other way around.
In any case, if the free tier sucked, all of them would be unlikely to convert. People will remember that your product sucks, not that they had to pay to get decent performance.
It reminds me of the game "Game Dev Tycoon", where they released a version on torrent sites where after about a year of ingame time your company would go bankrupt because of loss of profits due to piracy. The retail version of the game didn't even include piracy as a mechanic, it was just added as a joke in the torrent version.
Still, Twitter and Reddit discussions about the game were filled with "don't buy that game. It's impossible to play for more than an hour without going bankrupt". Of course none of those users admitted that they pirated the game, and word-of-mouth reviews of the game became "don't buy it, it's terribly balanced / unfair"
Ah but the rub is that it would not be unreliable.
One of the things I discovered was that "reliable" in the eyes of non-engineers isn't the same thing. I have a NAS system for my important data because I know it is reliable, I know dozens of people who "have a copy on a flash stick" because they consider that reliable.
You can build "good enough" in a rack that will serve a LOT of clients. One layer of ZFS (1U + 3U) for storage, Five 1U servers, one 2U 10G switch.
In my experience that is 1 failure (that results in an outage) every 2 years at most. When I was at Google I (like everyone) had access to failure information about equipment in the "fleet." Motherboards do fail, but VERY rarely, disks are the worst offender but with double parity ZFS you have a week at a minimum to replace a failed drive. ALL the drive failures at Blekko announced themselves before they failed with SMART data.
So in addition to the colo cost you've got an engineer spending part of their time watching the rack, fractional head count cost.
I have a tiny VPS that costs less than $2 per month. I run a chat server on it. In seven years it has had no failures and one hour of planned downtime. That's better than any of the major cloud services. Simple stuff is surprisingly reliable.
I’m guessing that if you don’t join big federated chatrooms on your Matrix server, it runs absolutely fine on minimal resources.
One of the smarter things the bluesky team looks to be doing is to split the world into heavy-lifting versus personal servers, so folks don’t end up with their personal servers suddenly sucking up lots of resources just because a user views #wtf or whatever. We should look into this sort of
tiering too for Matrix, to eliminate the “Matrix is resource heavy” snark.
I don't federate. If I had more control over how much data other servers could dump on my server, other than restricting rooms with X number of users, I would. Synapse and Element together are heavier than any other chat servers/clients I've ran, with only one exception.
It is not a big problem, because my number of active users is fairly small (under 50), but I could see myself having to use a different server software, or possibly a different protocol all together, if it were to open up and grow.
And if that vpn had been hosted in OVH's Strasbourg datacenter, in 2021 you would have had a huge downtime and possibly total loss of data without a backup in another datacenter.
It is like driving under influence. Many people get away with it most if not all their life. Other die in stupid car crash alongside their pregnant wife mere days after their mariage.
Google pulled off a similar thing with their photos app. Offered "unlimited" storage in 2016, improved the AI leveraging all our data, discontinued in 2021.
I worked for a hardware company that serviced devices decades old.
I remember walking through the back room of our Service Department, and seeing cameras on a shelf that were 60 years old. They were there for parts, if someone brought in an oldie.
I'm sure the service wasn't free, but they were willing to do it.
In our work, we were constantly being told to "play the long game," and think about how the software would age.
They were still using an SDK that I wrote in 1994/5, 25 years later.
> Zulip’s support strategy is, as much as possible, to solve the reported problem
> it’s not how most companies handle their support load
This is so sad, Alexa play despacito. If "most companies" no longer actually solve issues through customer service, what is even happening to the world?
I'm starting to feel like the purpose of customer service is actually to waste the customer's time with the impression of helpfulness until they no longer have any energy and give up pursuing other avenues.
Presumably to prevent upset customers from leaving bad reviews, trying to contact anyone else at the company, or threatening legal action.
Is there ground for legal action, particularly if you depended on this? It seems like a contract of sorts, and if any of their sales people ever assured anyone it was "free forever" I think that becomes a verbal contact.
Yes. It does not become a "verbal contract," but the concept is promissory estoppel. Look it up.
If you make a promise, and I rely on that promise, and I suffer financial loss, you're liable.
It's a good idea too. If you promise that a plan will be free forever, people should be able to rely on that promise. You might get beta tester, promoters, or whatever you want. If those people stop being useful to you, you can't just throw them on out on their bums. You're hosting their data, there's a cost to migrating that data away. If they've integrated with your APIs, it can be a high cost. If that what you'd like, promise "free" but not "free forever."
It almost never makes sense to sue -- it's just not worth it -- but a business which breaks a "free forever" promise is probably breaking the law, and in the era of the internet, is almost definitely breaking the law in some jurisdiction.
I’m a lawyer. I think a reasonably competently drafted terms of service could obviate most legal exposure. In the event that a promissory estoppel cause of action was established (like other posters have, I think, correctly noted, but which would also be an expensive affirmative burden to prove in court) then the plaintiff would still have to prove damages. And what is that, $10 per month per user for the affected period? And I don’t think “forever” is an enforceable affected period.
So short answer, probably no practical legal remedy imho.
Quite possibly. But not certain; and quite likely not with the cost of lawyer bills and court fees to get to that point (to say nothing of the distraction that would cause to the business and/or key executives).
Depends on your jurisdiction. In Germany, for example, a court has recognized that Facebook enters in a contractual relationship with you when you register on the platform. As such, Facebook agrees to store and let you access your information on the platform in exchange for the permission to use that data for its own purposes.
The highest court in Germany (BGH) confirmed this in a court case that Facebook lost where parents were denied full access to the Facebook account of their deceased daughter (they were only allowed to view the memorialized profile but not log in and read the chat messages, for example). The court found that the parents rightfully inherited the contractual relationship with Facebook in its entirety and as such had to be given access to the data that Facebook agreed to store and make accessible to its user.
For example, Facebook has been sued multiple times for breaking terms in which they promised not to provide data to third parties without your consent.
There is. The goal of the "free forever" is to (1) exposure / publicity (2) lock-in (3) ecosystem / API integrations (4) eyeballs (5) customer counts for investor decks (6) etc.
This is a case in which the plaintiff claimed that the other party in a very large housing development contract went back on the implied promise of seeking planning permission, and it was ruled in the plaintiff's favour due to this:
> Thus, it seems to me that the content of the obligation of utmost good faith in the SPA was to adhere to the spirit of the contract, which was to seek to obtain planning consent for the maximum Developable Area in the shortest possible time, and to observe reasonable commercial standards of fair dealing, and to be faithful to the agreed common purpose, and to act consistently with the justified expectations of the parties. I do not need, it seems to me, to decide whether this obligation could only be broken if QD or CPC acted in bad faith, but it might be hard to understand, as Lord Scott said in Manifest Shipping how, without bad faith, there can be a breach of a "duty of good faith, utmost or otherwise".
This is well written, but it doesn’t really explain how or why Zulip will maintain its free plan forever. However, the existence of this post also makes Zulip committed deeper to not pull the rug on the free plan. Whenever that happens, I’d like to believe that there would be grandfathering for existing users on the free plan (unlike the rug pull that Google attempted with its free GSuite/Workplace offering and decided to not do it after a lot of backlash and bad press).
One thing I dislike about these chat platforms is limited message history. The 10,000-messages or 90-day message search history limits are arbitrary as well as too short to be useful for any group that has more than a few members on a specific topic/area. For some (or many?) people, this will be a practical and annoying limitation that makes the platform useless for anything other than trivial chats where history doesn’t matter (except for “this is what you said two days ago”).
Instead, they could consider offering very small (?) teams unlimited history. Platforms like Telegram (and Discord too, not sure?) are offering more and more features for free. Enterprise application integrations may be one area where Slack/Mattermost/RocketChat/Zulip may have an advantage for the time being.
> This is well written, but it doesn’t really explain how or why Zulip will maintain its free plan forever.
i don't see anywhere zulip has made that claim, merely that it is currently free. in fact, it explains that they're careful about what promises they make, so that they don't end up having to break them.
That merely says that there is no plan that the writer knows of to pull the plug on you. And indefinitely is a duration of currently undefined length, not infinite length.
which isn't a promise that it will be "free forever". in the context of the rest of the article, it's not even an attempt to mislead you into thinking it will be free forever. though it is apparently enough to base willful misunderstanding on.
And their broader thrust in the post is less the forever and more of the "own your mistakes". Don't pretend like you never had a free forever plan.
Their promise seems to be less "we'll ACTUALLY be free forever" and more "we're free right now, but if that's going to change, we'll communicate with you".
I agree. If I ever have to leave my current job (which could be soonish, startup and runway you know...) one of the things I'll miss most is the clean messaging experience provided by zulip. Everyone who likes the HN UX should be comfortable with zulip, even if it's quite a bit richer in details.
We run our zulip on a smallish EC2 instance. It's probably less than a Euro/month/employee.
We pay zulip for their hosted version, which works out cheaper than slack and in any event I would like to support the development.
I have had pushback from non-technical staff (and pushback from tech workers for a week, but now they seem to be very happy aside from UX bugs esp with the mobile app).
If you're ever looking for work, we are hiring across the board, fully remote in Sweden or Germany. (due to tax!)
Thanks for the hint. As a German speaking Swedish that could be a great fit. I have coded a component for Lamborghini but not a part of my career I am particularly proud of. There should be smarter things to do than ruining the planet. So don't expect an application despite of zulip ;)
If I were a legislator, I would introduce a bill to ban footnotes in advertising. Everything that the company feels it needs to print, must be included in the main ad copy.
If an ad for a depression medicine on the tv has time to say crazy things like “side effects may include depression, […] and death”, I am sure Charter and Comcast have enough time to say that their gigabit coax service is only gigabit for downloads, not for uploads.
Why not, besides the practical impossibility of the current Congress passing such a law?
IMHO, it would level the playing field for honest manufacturers and service providers.
Sure, it would effectively outlaw many types of ads that we see today, but do you think any of the types of ads that rely on hidden fine print are really all that valuable to our economy or society?
Ok let's take contests. They're void where prohibited and a bunch of other rules apply. Should the odds of winning along with these caveats be stated in the copy?
Let's take guarantees and warranties. There's certainly nuances there. Should all those also be disclosed in the main copy?
Let's take the main thing here. What if they went out of business? Forever never actually means for perpetuity.
All these are obvious? So is the rule to stare everything but the obvious? Who determines that?
There's so many practical details that complicate things here
In fact, much of these things have made their way into the law a long time ago. Maybe you just want to restrict the freedom of how they can display it?
there are laws about this (in the UK), and very often you can get settlements.
Misleading advertising is a punishable offence and “terms and conditions” is usually not a strong enough defence if the terms are dense enough or buried enough.
People don't look at the history of the company or the owners when they sign up; if I sign up for a 'one time pay, forever' plan, I need to to know this company, or, if it's new, the owners, have a history of delivering on promises in the past. If I sign up with a company that has delivered something for the past 15 years reliably and now add a forever plan, I can assume with some certainty it will continue. If it's startup of 1 month old with some owners without track record, I can assume they won't honour this deal when things go either really well or really badly. But I guess most people just buy stuff like this on a whim and then complain it doesn't work out.
while i agree with your conclusions regarding the probability if a "forever"-plan will be honoured, people are rightfully pissed. and it doesnt matter if people bought on a whim or after extensive research, the company advertised it as "forever" and when they now dont honour the deal they should be called out as fraudster/liars. cause thats what it is and i dont care if others do it too.
Fully agree, but the research helps. I buy them sometimes if a service I have used for years offers one suddenly to get in some cash. I have not been betrayed; I do have some that are 15 years old. And they work.
Maybe it works to have a free tier and yank the rug out from everyone, and maybe the solution is that we should just pay for what things cost?
The whole internet is like this, people often don't want to pay, they want it free, then the advertisers pay, we get pissy about advertising, and we become the product, and we flock to the next free thing after the free thing stops being free ...
I wish things weren't all free, I wish we paid easily, and the relationship really be between us and the provider, directly with enough money to actually make them profitable. But it isn't that way for a lot of things, and I feel like we as users are part of the problem too.
> maybe the solution is that we should just pay for what things cost?
Well I bet how much those free accounts were costing is way less than $10 per month per user. The self hosting page suggests that you can have "up to 1,000 users" on a few dollar VPS. A little more if you need to upload tons and tons of images.
posteo.de is an example of a company offering an email account with some storage for 1 euro a month on Roundcube webmail or IMAP/POP3. Not a customer, nor anything to do with them, but I do keep this in mind in case my current ISP gets taken over or goes under. Once there is a credit card registered and all it is easy to upsell ( more storage and more aliases &c).
I wonder if they make any money on the 1 euro accounts given the tendency of most people to not use the max resources?
I agree with you, I'd rather pay for stuff. But paid products required appropriate information about what you're buying. A freemium model is one way that potential buyers can decide if a thing is valuable enough to pay for.
> maybe the solution is that we should just pay for what things cost?
I understand your frustration, but in the end things cost what people are willing to pay. It would be hard to determine an intrinsic price for a cloud-hosted chat server.
All because they took VC money and now they are under pressure to start acting like a business and ‘make money’ instead of burning it for so-called ‘free forever’ deals that age like milk.
Cheese is typically aged but after it already became cheese by curdling (usually using renit) and undergoing some fermentation.
In parts of the world where you can get raw milk (ie not the us) milk sours and becomes something like buttermilk. Some farmers cheeses are made from raw milk that has curdled in this way.
In the us, milk is pasteurized completely enough that it rots instead of souring. I believe this phrase is American in origin, and is intended to be in contrast to the phrase “ages like fine wine”. Whatever the case milk does not become better milk with time.
You should use Zulip not because it's free, but rather because it's excellent and kicks the pants off of Slack and its clones, who are more of an impediment to productivity than an aid. (Well, the desktop experience is excellent, but the phone app is lacking.)
How is the phone app lacking? I am in the lucky situation to use zulip on the desktop at work. I often work long days, but my phone I keep 100% free of work stuff. So I have never seen the phone app, but I have heard unspecific complaints about the phone app before.
there’s a lot of odd behaviour, replying to a topic seems to not work so well or to be inconsistent.
sometimes you cant easily select a topic to reply to; responding to a topic in the stream view requires that you open the topic by pressing the slim topic header (not the message itself, like the desktop client)
You cant start a poll.
deleting a message results in the message being edited to the string: “(deleted)” which is not what the desktop does.
editing text seems fine unless its a word near the left of the text box, in which case the keyboard toggles between visible and hidden (moving the entire UI).
Does anyone think there could be potential for some sort of escrowed trust fund structure around guaranteed long-term service hosting? As a third party service, like Stripe.
Customers could have an option to pay a bit more for a "lifetime" long-term subscription plan. Part of the fee goes into the trust fund, which has guidelines on low-fee investments and designed to produce an income for more than 30 years, with something like a 3% withdrawal rate annually.
Actual hosting costs are pretty marginal with the right setup and decreasing over the long-run, it's really the security & compatibility updates, and any app-killing bugs that could be tricky to handle cost-wise.
I feel like there's two sides to this. On one hand, I agree with Zulip: don't make promises you're not sure can keep. On the other, you also shouldn't believe promises if the person making them is obviously not in a position to guarantee.
Example: suppose I offer you free email hosting "forever". Should you believe me? What if I go out of business? Well, in that case, I can at least ensure that your email address gets transferred to a different provider, so I'll still have kept my promise. So maybe this particular promise is believable.
But that only works because email is more or less a standard so there are many providers. Suppose I offer something that no one else does. Can you trust my promise that it will be "free forever"? Clearly, if I go out of business, then no.
Can I at least make a conditional promise that it will be free "as long as I'm in business"? But suppose I'm a month from bankruptcy, and my accountant tells me that getting rid of my free tier would save me. Surely, it's better for my free users to lose service rather than ALL my users losing service. So, unless you're sure I'd never be in that situation, you shouldn't believe me when I say "as long as I'm business this will be free".
Okay, how about a vague promise like "this service will keep its free tier around unless the business is in a desperate situation of some kind"? That's a promise that I could indeed keep, if I decide it's important enough... unless... how sure are you that I'll remain in full control of what is currently "my" business? What if I take my company public? I might then be kicked out by the board. (It happened to Steve Jobs, right?) So either my "free forever" promise means I'm not allowed to go public, or at least I need to do some very careful legal acrobatics to ensure that the board can't go back on my promise, even if they kick me out.
Still, if you find yourself needing to break a promise you made about "forever" a mere month after you made it, you should probably at least apologize instead of just hoping that no one remembers that you ever made such a promise. Chances are, they will indeed remember. If "it's the right thing to do" is not enough motivation, then do it for the brownie points, you'll get more of them this way. ("Who cares about brownie points?" you ask? Well, clearly, if they weren't worried about brownie points then they wouldn't be playing this weird game of "let's pretend we never said the forever".)
I think, they need another nore skilled Product Manager. Offer "Free Forever" is a big mistake. Silently closing it - another big mistake.
Instead of the first they could offer user count limited version. I.e. 10 users max, $10/month. The same as Atlassian did with Jira.
Instead of the second, they could offer 50 or even 70% special discount from paid plan($10/user/month) to move free users to paid plan. Company gets money and users loyalty and no negative.
My 2c: I hate that those changes are that SUDDEN. You can’t afford the free offering anymore? Fine.
Give me 12 months to migrate. 4 months is basically extortion. I have the same compliant about google services: shutting them down in a few months is a shitty move. Give me time to find a replacement; especially if 0.5% of your users means millions of people.
Their problem is they went with the 'forever' word instead of the much more common 'lifetime' word. That way they can tell you that even though you might have thought it was your lifetime they were talking about; in reality they were talking about the lifetime of something completely different.
It was indeed my lifetime. Now I have to watch out for ninjas and pianos randomly falling out of the sky, otherwise everyone's "free for lifetime" offer will be converted into paid plans.
"forever" or "lifetime" to a running service is a red flag. It makes no sense unless you explicitly know how it fits their business model. Ex they take your data, have ads etc
They made a mistake promising you such a deal, but I dare say you also made a mistake trusting it.
I think it’s clear that “lifetime” means the lifetime of the service. There are some services where the economics work out. And some where it doesn’t. But I agree that “free forever” is a much more aspirational statement than “lifetime access” and shouldn’t be trusted too much.
“We fully expect to continue offering the Zulip Cloud Free plan indefinitely” doesn’t exactly garner confidence from an article written by a competitor. SMH.
From my point of view there's a world of difference between "we fully expect to continue offering free indefinitely" and "free forever". In the first case, they talk about their expectations, while the second case is a promise. Also "indefinitely" means that the end is unknown, not that it's forever.
Ah, Mattermost. Their philosophy is to get people involved on terms they do not intend to keep, and then pull the rug from beneath them and force them to pay up. It's the only chat program I know where they've rugpulled the same basic features and put them behind premiums more than once.
It was amusing to read the end of the blog post with this.
> We fully expect to continue offering the Zulip Cloud Free plan indefinitely, and are excited to empower effective collaboration for teams large and small.
Until when?
“Sorry, we are going to take away that “indefinitely” plan next month”?
The “free forever”, and “truly unlimited” like statements should just be banned.
Why ban those statements if you can regulate them to truly mean what they mean? Have companies set up the appropriate legal structures and funds to ensure the service can continue beyond the lifetime of the company.
Textbook fraud, yes. But it's a tool that also the big players with deep pockets would like to continue using. People look the other way, because the alternative is admitting, that there is a serious corrup.. lobbying problem.
A realistic long term solution, so we can stop worrying, would be another rebranding. Instead of "legal fraud" we should start calling it "clever scheme" and instantly feel better about the situation.
I am not sure why anyone is surprised or this should even be news. I don’t have a speck of business education and I can see this is no way sustainable. “Free forever” is not a sound business strategy (shock emoji). If it is free, like Youtube, Reddit, Zulip, than expects them to profit in some other way. If you can’t explain how a business profit you shouldn’t use it because:
If you're not willing to actually offer it forever, just call it a free plan instead of lying about it.