I agree. Cloudkick did very well with a freenium model -- it let sysadmins try out our service on their personal machines -- and it led to many using it inside

I agree. Cloudkick did very well with a freenium model -- it let sysadmins try out our service on their personal machines -- and it led to many using it inside their businesses later. Those kinds of conversions and upsells are the perfect reason for a B2B application to have a freenium model. It wasn't about getting users for investors, we just looked at it more like a loss-leader and part of our user acquisition costs -- just like the costs of buying Google Ads, etc.