As an outsider, here is my perspective on a number of things you could do: Segment your users into plans. Do some user research on the archetypes and Jobs To B

As an outsider, here is my perspective on a number of things you could do: Segment your users into plans. Do some user research on the archetypes and Jobs To Be Done that different people are using your product for. Segment features according to this and charge accordingly. For example all of the high availability, redundant web servers and snapshotting should go only on the paid plans. You can make the reasonable assumption that if people aren't paying for your service then they don't value their data very highly, so why should you? Some rough plans I can imagine would be: Undergraduate, Graduate, Professor. These people have different needs, desires, and fears; cater to them. This might be a hard one, but dropping the free plan will make you cashflow positive immediately. For people who can't/won't pay, you can provide good instructions on how to set up the VM if people don't want to pay. Give people 30 days notice, and give them benefits for signing up, e.g. 20% discount for life of their account. Look at partnering with teaching institutions that are using your software. Offer them a discount on a class purchase of accounts, or sell them support running the VM on their own infrastructure (perhaps integrating with Moodle or their auth system for an additional fee?). Look at how people get value from SMC, your costs scale linearly with usage, so it may be good to scale your prices too. One option could be to replace the free tier with a pay-as-you-go tier where people pre-pay for x hours/month, and higher tiers get unlimited usage. On the homepage, remove the section about grants received as it sounds like that is no longer the case. Make the homepage a lot nicer and present the benefits of SMC much more clearly. As others have said, it's not clear at all what plans are available or what differentiates them until you put in a payment card. This is not a compelling prospect.