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Anecdata: Trello and Jira both have free plans that I used that caused me to recommend them for paid usage at multiple companies I’ve worked with. Those free pl

Anecdata: Trello and Jira both have free plans that I used that caused me to recommend them for paid usage at multiple companies I’ve worked with. Those free plans resulted in $xx-$xxxx monthly subscriptions. Asana has a paid plan with a 5-user minimum limit. I never bothered to even try it since I wouldn’t have the extended time to play with it. As a result it never even got mentioned to companies I’ve worked with. So, it’s important to have a free plan (or at least very cheap paid plan as the article recommended) for “influencers” to get heavily involved with.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
The article specifically mentions free trial periods as being a good idea.
- Proziam 6y ago
  Different anecdata here. Trial periods suck. My experience is that I rarely have enough time to determine if I really like the service or if it's still just a shiny new tool to play with. I need more than 14-30 days to actually put in the work to understand a reasonably complex tool (say a CRM system) well enough to make a commercial recommendation. Obviously this issue doesn't apply to all SaaS companies but it's probably common enough to be worthy of consideration.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    There's also the case of services which will only do (or strongly guide you to) the highest level subscription for the trial period without obvious indicators for which option you see is available in lower tiers. Sure, you can dig through the features table linked from the pricing pages, but that's unnecessary effort.
- detaro 6y ago
  both examples given specifically have free plans, not just trial periods. A trial period is useful for specific evaluation, but not for having experience with a tool and recommending it on that basis.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Xixi 6y ago
  Time is not free. If it's too expensive that I won't use it for my own projects, I'm not going to even bother with a free trial. Same if you don't tell me your price up front, I'm not going to bother with the free trial. Tools that will get recommended at my workplace are more likely to be the ones that I use for my own side projects, since I already know them and they will allow me to move fast. And the tools I use at home are more likely to be the free/cheap ones than the expensive ones. Of course specifics and circumstances matters. If a tool is critical for the business then we will review everything in depth and pick the best, regardless of trial/free plan/etc. And of course, sometimes the critical task is simply to ship ASAP...
- mrzimmerman 6y ago
  Terrible title on their post then. I, personally, rarely use a trial period for anything I’m testing for the long term. It’s not worth integrating it into my day to day if I may have to pay more then I want. BUT, I do think it’s important to offer a free level for a lot of simple services to get people hooked. Costco does it, and it works for a lot of software.
tekacs 6y ago
I feel like free plans work best for products with a business/enterprise side: - where free users are an onramp for getting $x,xxx/mo-$xx,xxx/mo contracts with companies. - where many, many free users are subsidized every time a company signs up. Trello/Jira/Asana seem to fall pretty firmly into that territory. On the other hand, those running SaaS with fairly low per-month subscription value (e.g. $99-150/mo, as a lot of smaller or bootstrapped SaaSes seem to charge [1]) wouldn't necessarily get much value from these users. [1]: https://plausible.io/#pricing https://plausible.io/#pricing (just picked these folks at random)
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  Trello is a service I would probably pay for (before purchase by Atlassian, now don't trust) but never have because the free tier covers my needs adequately. For me free plans work best for products that other products can be built on top of, because if I think I am going to build a product I want to have enough of a free tier that I can build the service and when I start having to pay for it I will have enough progress to know that it is worth investing money as well as time in it. Basically when I start paying for a service like that I want to have my product in release and at least a customer or two. Of course I have only ever achieved this once.
mNovak 6y ago
Agreed. I think free tier user limits (where appropriate) are much better than trial periods for evaluation. I'm busy, and if it's not mission critical, evaluating this piece of software may not be the only thing on my to-do list; I may hardly get around to it in 2 weeks.
- bonestamp2 6y ago
  Agreed. It may also contribute to additional competitor comparisons. If I only have two weeks to evaluate something, I'm likely going to be much more thorough with competitive analysis in that time period. On the other hand, if I have unlimited time then I will likely start with a pretty broad look at the available competitors and then once I've signed up for what appears to be the best option, I'll only look into competitors as I hit roadblocks.
ben509 6y ago
I think trials can be improved for services where you can discern whether the user is directly interacting with it. You give them 100 days of usage, and then decrement a counter when they interact with the site the first time each day.
- EdwardDiego 6y ago
  This would be ideal for me. I might not need to use your project every day, so only giving me 14 days that count down from my sign up is not ideal. Also, please don't send multiple "You've only got X-N days left in your plan!" pressure-to-convert emails.
- namrog84 6y ago
  BeyondCompare does this and I've been slowing decrementing my 30 day usage trial for almost a year. I'm likely going to buy when it gets near zero but I use it so infrequently it just hasn't caused justification to purchase. But if it wasn't for this extended usage decrement counter id have likely just gone with something else after 30 day trial of using it but 1 day
  - grogenaut 6y ago
    Used beyond compare heavily at a previous company... when I got to amazon I immediately expensed it. I use it about 30-50 times a year but it's definitely worth a buck each time I need it. (edit, removed indefinite pronoun)
  - whatever_dude 6y ago
    Tangent, but BeyondCompare is one of the few tools I'm proud to have purchased. I use it all the time for file and folder diff. It has been invaluable for me and my work on both Windows and macOS.
- woofie11 6y ago
  I'm not a big fan of that. You disincentive usage. Daily quota is the way to go. Amazon free micro instances are a perfect example. Enough to build. Not enough to go to production.
pfranz 6y ago
Similarly, I work in industries with fairly expensive software. Off and on they'll offer free, limited educational versions. When a new version comes out I'll often dabble with it at home if there's a free version available--there have been times where it wasn't offered, so I didn't. Often, it's new or updated features. Because my day to day work is getting things done I'm less likely to risk a new and untested approach and we stick with older software versions until we have to. Without a free version I'm less likely to try out a new version or deviate as much as I would if there's not a clear benefit. It makes the software stickier (assuming they did improve it).
woofie11 6y ago
My experience too. ALWAYS have a lifetime free plan. It's okay to make it a useless lifetime free plan (your data disappears every 2 weeks; you have a 3 email per day quota; etc.). It just need to be enough to seriously evaluate your product, and if it has APIs, to develop to them. There are sometimes good reasons to do more, and sometimes not. But that's the minimum. In the early days of AWS, I would build thing on AWS' free tier, and they turned into products later. One product is making AWS millions (literally). AWS lost out when I changed orgs, my one-year free tier quota was gone, and I couldn't do the same at future orgs. At big organizations, the overhead of a PO is sufficient that you don't do it unless you have a compelling business case. Free plan allows you to build a business case over a weekend. I've gone free->paid many times. It's worth noting the figures here. The case for a free plan is much more compelling for a Fortune 500 company who will sign a million-dollar contract than for a small business.
- IMTDb 6y ago
  Me experience is the exact opposite. As a user: - If I need the service and only intend to use it for a very small project, I love forever free plans. Because I know I can subscribe use your server time and forget my account forever. I often subscribe with a temp email so that I don't even receive your emails anymore. - If I seriously need the service and is ready to pay for it, I don't really care about the free forever plan vs free trial vs paid trial. As a business: - Any time I have offered a free forever plan, basically 95% of the created accounts are dormant free accounts (like I personally am when I find the correct tool to scratch my itch). 4% are from people (usually from south east asia) creating hundreds/thousands of accounts (sometimes manually !) to circumvent the free plan limitations instead of just paying for the service. And 1% are from legitimate users/customers. - People in the 95 and 4% categories still believe they are owed support. And if you don't give them an easy way to let them contact you, they now have twitter and facebook and business reviews websites to get to you. On top of emails, LinkedIn messages and yes, phone calls. - Cutting the free accounts has almost no impact on real customers acquisition. You can let people experience your product with a temporary trial, that includes support and way more features, but behind the credit card screen. Extend the free trial as much as needed if people ask for it through your usual support channel. You will still get abusers but those are easier to detect, because they need to provide some payment details which are harder to fake, and after you shut them down for the third time in a row, they usually go away.
protoduction 6y ago
Hi, author of the page here. I didn't expect this to end up so high on HN. You're right that there is a place for free plans, the article I wrote is probably too one-sided. I planned on adding an extra section near the end for some cases when a free plan does make sense (I will wait until it is no longer discussed here). Other than the "influencer" angle you mentioned, it also makes sense for products where you can offer the first X units for free, and many will have the desire for more (2 free designs for a website builder, or the first 10 levels free in a video game).
- burning_hamster 6y ago
  On a different note, why does your website look so refreshing (for lack of a better word)?! Beautiful design (non-design?).
- jonpurdy 6y ago
  No worries; there’s always a balance between being overly verbose and not covering every edge case. The core point of your article was still clear, and as a result generated interesting discussion and follow up for an update.
- 6510 6y ago
  It depends on what the service costs to run. I really don't like a model where one customer pays for the other but promoting a new service is getting more expensive every year. It might be worth the insanity of large numbers of low tier customers. One thing is for sure, no one likes a service that changes prices with free > paid being the least likable. (paid > free as the nr 2?) I think you can get away by describing the situation properly in advance. i.e. what might happen with the free service in the future. Something like: Guaranteed to be free for 6 months (12 months if you register now). If we fail to reach an audience by offering a free plan it will be x dollar per month/year/query. We will contact you 3 months in advance. It seems the free pony! era has to end. Downtime from cleaning up after a vanishing free service is to annoying.
inopinatus 6y ago
The examples of Trello and Jira are specifically problematic, because their history says otherwise: Jira built its considerable market share and brand awareness without a free plan of any kind, offering instead just a short-term trial license; I remember just a few years ago that the price of admission was thousands of dollars per server, and yet here it is. And Trello comes from the other direction, having been entirely free of charge at launch and only latterly monetizing. The broader problem with this example is that the companies in question evidently don't value information, and have instead relied on personal hubris, which speaking as a longtime service provider is itself a red flag for "problem customer", and if not quite the horrors depicted in the article then certainly on that spectrum. All of which illustrates that talking to anyone who self-describes as an "influencer" is generally a net negative, unless you're in the FMCG category. Influencers demanding freebies is something to be abhorred, and there is no equivalence here to seeking high quality professional advice.
- viraptor 6y ago
  I read the "influencer" in original post as descriptive not prescriptive. > the companies in question evidently don't value information, and have instead relied on personal hubris Nothing in the post indicated hubris to me. "I have used this service before and can give you an estimation of how well it fits our usecase" is probably the best information about a service you can get. The alternative is to spend time and money to discover that yourself.
  - inopinatus 6y ago
    > Nothing in the post indicated hubris to me. Claiming that you are personally responsible for Jira and Trello's marketing cut-through is sheer hubris. And furthermore: > The alternative is to spend time and money to discover that yourself That's not an "alternative", that is simply professional consulting behaviour. Making the recommendation whilst declining to invest in the quality of that recommendation is hubris. And I'll double down by adding that "influencers" demanding freebies is downright obnoxious hubris. In the last few years, some segment of the tech community has normalized this behaviour as somehow acceptable and rational, but in practice it's as toxic as the article suggests.
alexh1 6y ago
I run a business that competes with those companies you mentioned, it's called Portabella (https://portabella.io https://portabella.io), an end-to-end encrypted and privacy friendly alternative. We have a free plan that basically locks you down collaboration wise (limits inviting anyone to your projects). We haven't had many people convert yet (https://portabella.io/open https://portabella.io/open) but I'm starting to think it'd be better to offer no free plan but a 7 day free trial
keithnz 6y ago
my anecdotal experience is similar, there's quite a few products we use because we started with the free plan, and now pay for the product. One of the big problems over the last few years is we have ended up with a LOT of useless subscriptions (often cheap ones) sitting there doing nothing for a long time, so it gets tricky, people want to have conversations about what we will be getting out of a new subscription to a product before we have started to use it in any meaningful way ( there's a lot we try out and abandon ), even when cheap, the ones we integrate, its a no brainer paying for or bumping up to the next tier as we use it more.
dt3ft 6y ago
I used to offer a free plan on https://pdf2qrcode.com https://pdf2qrcode.com but not anymore since it costs to have free users and I did not see any conversions into a paid plan. Replaced with a 60 day free trial and it gets the job done.
- TalebKabbara 6y ago
  Hi, could you please elaborate on “it costs to have free users”? What kind of costs?
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Jira is one of those products, but an even bigger one (I think?) that I've seen in multiple places is Slack. I don't know if my experience is universal, but in multiple workplaces I've been at, people started using Slack (the free plan) as a grassroots / from the trenches / heck trying to get corporate approval movement; they just started using it and it spread among people, until at some point it gained critical mass, the limits became annoying, and they finally get leadership buy-in.
ohazi 6y ago
You recommended JIRA? To someone that you don't hate?
- alexhutcheson 6y ago
  If you use it as a full project management tool it can be a bit painful, but is there a better tool you’d recommend for someone who just wants a good bug tracker?
polote 6y ago
You can't just tell, I've used the product for free and I've recommended the product to paying customers so that it's worth it. How much do you cost the company by using the software for free? How much cost the thousands of users that use the product for free and don't recommend it to paying users? Free plan doesn't have a one sided answer. Sometimes it is a good idea, sometimes it is not. Would Salesforce benefit from having a fee plan? This is not obvious to me

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

The article specifically mentions free trial periods as being a good idea.

Proziam 6y ago
Different anecdata here. Trial periods suck. My experience is that I rarely have enough time to determine if I really like the service or if it's still just a shiny new tool to play with. I need more than 14-30 days to actually put in the work to understand a reasonably complex tool (say a CRM system) well enough to make a commercial recommendation. Obviously this issue doesn't apply to all SaaS companies but it's probably common enough to be worthy of consideration.
- viraptor 6y ago
  There's also the case of services which will only do (or strongly guide you to) the highest level subscription for the trial period without obvious indicators for which option you see is available in lower tiers. Sure, you can dig through the features table linked from the pricing pages, but that's unnecessary effort.
detaro 6y ago
both examples given specifically have free plans, not just trial periods. A trial period is useful for specific evaluation, but not for having experience with a tool and recommending it on that basis.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Xixi 6y ago
Time is not free. If it's too expensive that I won't use it for my own projects, I'm not going to even bother with a free trial. Same if you don't tell me your price up front, I'm not going to bother with the free trial. Tools that will get recommended at my workplace are more likely to be the ones that I use for my own side projects, since I already know them and they will allow me to move fast. And the tools I use at home are more likely to be the free/cheap ones than the expensive ones. Of course specifics and circumstances matters. If a tool is critical for the business then we will review everything in depth and pick the best, regardless of trial/free plan/etc. And of course, sometimes the critical task is simply to ship ASAP...
mrzimmerman 6y ago
Terrible title on their post then. I, personally, rarely use a trial period for anything I’m testing for the long term. It’s not worth integrating it into my day to day if I may have to pay more then I want. BUT, I do think it’s important to offer a free level for a lot of simple services to get people hooked. Costco does it, and it works for a lot of software.

tekacs 6y ago

I feel like free plans work best for products with a business/enterprise side: - where free users are an onramp for getting $x,xxx/mo-$xx,xxx/mo contracts with companies. - where many, many free users are subsidized every time a company signs up. Trello/Jira/Asana seem to fall pretty firmly into that territory. On the other hand, those running SaaS with fairly low per-month subscription value (e.g. $99-150/mo, as a lot of smaller or bootstrapped SaaSes seem to charge [1]) wouldn't necessarily get much value from these users. [1]: https://plausible.io/#pricing https://plausible.io/#pricing (just picked these folks at random)

bryanrasmussen 6y ago
Trello is a service I would probably pay for (before purchase by Atlassian, now don't trust) but never have because the free tier covers my needs adequately. For me free plans work best for products that other products can be built on top of, because if I think I am going to build a product I want to have enough of a free tier that I can build the service and when I start having to pay for it I will have enough progress to know that it is worth investing money as well as time in it. Basically when I start paying for a service like that I want to have my product in release and at least a customer or two. Of course I have only ever achieved this once.

mNovak 6y ago

Agreed. I think free tier user limits (where appropriate) are much better than trial periods for evaluation. I'm busy, and if it's not mission critical, evaluating this piece of software may not be the only thing on my to-do list; I may hardly get around to it in 2 weeks.

bonestamp2 6y ago
Agreed. It may also contribute to additional competitor comparisons. If I only have two weeks to evaluate something, I'm likely going to be much more thorough with competitive analysis in that time period. On the other hand, if I have unlimited time then I will likely start with a pretty broad look at the available competitors and then once I've signed up for what appears to be the best option, I'll only look into competitors as I hit roadblocks.

ben509 6y ago

I think trials can be improved for services where you can discern whether the user is directly interacting with it. You give them 100 days of usage, and then decrement a counter when they interact with the site the first time each day.

EdwardDiego 6y ago
This would be ideal for me. I might not need to use your project every day, so only giving me 14 days that count down from my sign up is not ideal. Also, please don't send multiple "You've only got X-N days left in your plan!" pressure-to-convert emails.
namrog84 6y ago
BeyondCompare does this and I've been slowing decrementing my 30 day usage trial for almost a year. I'm likely going to buy when it gets near zero but I use it so infrequently it just hasn't caused justification to purchase. But if it wasn't for this extended usage decrement counter id have likely just gone with something else after 30 day trial of using it but 1 day
- grogenaut 6y ago
  Used beyond compare heavily at a previous company... when I got to amazon I immediately expensed it. I use it about 30-50 times a year but it's definitely worth a buck each time I need it. (edit, removed indefinite pronoun)
- whatever_dude 6y ago
  Tangent, but BeyondCompare is one of the few tools I'm proud to have purchased. I use it all the time for file and folder diff. It has been invaluable for me and my work on both Windows and macOS.
woofie11 6y ago
I'm not a big fan of that. You disincentive usage. Daily quota is the way to go. Amazon free micro instances are a perfect example. Enough to build. Not enough to go to production.

pfranz 6y ago

Similarly, I work in industries with fairly expensive software. Off and on they'll offer free, limited educational versions. When a new version comes out I'll often dabble with it at home if there's a free version available--there have been times where it wasn't offered, so I didn't. Often, it's new or updated features. Because my day to day work is getting things done I'm less likely to risk a new and untested approach and we stick with older software versions until we have to. Without a free version I'm less likely to try out a new version or deviate as much as I would if there's not a clear benefit. It makes the software stickier (assuming they did improve it).

woofie11 6y ago

My experience too. ALWAYS have a lifetime free plan. It's okay to make it a useless lifetime free plan (your data disappears every 2 weeks; you have a 3 email per day quota; etc.). It just need to be enough to seriously evaluate your product, and if it has APIs, to develop to them. There are sometimes good reasons to do more, and sometimes not. But that's the minimum. In the early days of AWS, I would build thing on AWS' free tier, and they turned into products later. One product is making AWS millions (literally). AWS lost out when I changed orgs, my one-year free tier quota was gone, and I couldn't do the same at future orgs. At big organizations, the overhead of a PO is sufficient that you don't do it unless you have a compelling business case. Free plan allows you to build a business case over a weekend. I've gone free->paid many times. It's worth noting the figures here. The case for a free plan is much more compelling for a Fortune 500 company who will sign a million-dollar contract than for a small business.

IMTDb 6y ago
Me experience is the exact opposite. As a user: - If I need the service and only intend to use it for a very small project, I love forever free plans. Because I know I can subscribe use your server time and forget my account forever. I often subscribe with a temp email so that I don't even receive your emails anymore. - If I seriously need the service and is ready to pay for it, I don't really care about the free forever plan vs free trial vs paid trial. As a business: - Any time I have offered a free forever plan, basically 95% of the created accounts are dormant free accounts (like I personally am when I find the correct tool to scratch my itch). 4% are from people (usually from south east asia) creating hundreds/thousands of accounts (sometimes manually !) to circumvent the free plan limitations instead of just paying for the service. And 1% are from legitimate users/customers. - People in the 95 and 4% categories still believe they are owed support. And if you don't give them an easy way to let them contact you, they now have twitter and facebook and business reviews websites to get to you. On top of emails, LinkedIn messages and yes, phone calls. - Cutting the free accounts has almost no impact on real customers acquisition. You can let people experience your product with a temporary trial, that includes support and way more features, but behind the credit card screen. Extend the free trial as much as needed if people ask for it through your usual support channel. You will still get abusers but those are easier to detect, because they need to provide some payment details which are harder to fake, and after you shut them down for the third time in a row, they usually go away.

protoduction 6y ago

Hi, author of the page here. I didn't expect this to end up so high on HN. You're right that there is a place for free plans, the article I wrote is probably too one-sided. I planned on adding an extra section near the end for some cases when a free plan does make sense (I will wait until it is no longer discussed here). Other than the "influencer" angle you mentioned, it also makes sense for products where you can offer the first X units for free, and many will have the desire for more (2 free designs for a website builder, or the first 10 levels free in a video game).

burning_hamster 6y ago
On a different note, why does your website look so refreshing (for lack of a better word)?! Beautiful design (non-design?).
jonpurdy 6y ago
No worries; there’s always a balance between being overly verbose and not covering every edge case. The core point of your article was still clear, and as a result generated interesting discussion and follow up for an update.
6510 6y ago
It depends on what the service costs to run. I really don't like a model where one customer pays for the other but promoting a new service is getting more expensive every year. It might be worth the insanity of large numbers of low tier customers. One thing is for sure, no one likes a service that changes prices with free > paid being the least likable. (paid > free as the nr 2?) I think you can get away by describing the situation properly in advance. i.e. what might happen with the free service in the future. Something like: Guaranteed to be free for 6 months (12 months if you register now). If we fail to reach an audience by offering a free plan it will be x dollar per month/year/query. We will contact you 3 months in advance. It seems the free pony! era has to end. Downtime from cleaning up after a vanishing free service is to annoying.

inopinatus 6y ago

The examples of Trello and Jira are specifically problematic, because their history says otherwise: Jira built its considerable market share and brand awareness without a free plan of any kind, offering instead just a short-term trial license; I remember just a few years ago that the price of admission was thousands of dollars per server, and yet here it is. And Trello comes from the other direction, having been entirely free of charge at launch and only latterly monetizing. The broader problem with this example is that the companies in question evidently don't value information, and have instead relied on personal hubris, which speaking as a longtime service provider is itself a red flag for "problem customer", and if not quite the horrors depicted in the article then certainly on that spectrum. All of which illustrates that talking to anyone who self-describes as an "influencer" is generally a net negative, unless you're in the FMCG category. Influencers demanding freebies is something to be abhorred, and there is no equivalence here to seeking high quality professional advice.

viraptor 6y ago
I read the "influencer" in original post as descriptive not prescriptive. > the companies in question evidently don't value information, and have instead relied on personal hubris Nothing in the post indicated hubris to me. "I have used this service before and can give you an estimation of how well it fits our usecase" is probably the best information about a service you can get. The alternative is to spend time and money to discover that yourself.
- inopinatus 6y ago
  > Nothing in the post indicated hubris to me. Claiming that you are personally responsible for Jira and Trello's marketing cut-through is sheer hubris. And furthermore: > The alternative is to spend time and money to discover that yourself That's not an "alternative", that is simply professional consulting behaviour. Making the recommendation whilst declining to invest in the quality of that recommendation is hubris. And I'll double down by adding that "influencers" demanding freebies is downright obnoxious hubris. In the last few years, some segment of the tech community has normalized this behaviour as somehow acceptable and rational, but in practice it's as toxic as the article suggests.

alexh1 6y ago

I run a business that competes with those companies you mentioned, it's called Portabella (https://portabella.io https://portabella.io), an end-to-end encrypted and privacy friendly alternative. We have a free plan that basically locks you down collaboration wise (limits inviting anyone to your projects). We haven't had many people convert yet (https://portabella.io/open https://portabella.io/open) but I'm starting to think it'd be better to offer no free plan but a 7 day free trial

keithnz 6y ago

my anecdotal experience is similar, there's quite a few products we use because we started with the free plan, and now pay for the product. One of the big problems over the last few years is we have ended up with a LOT of useless subscriptions (often cheap ones) sitting there doing nothing for a long time, so it gets tricky, people want to have conversations about what we will be getting out of a new subscription to a product before we have started to use it in any meaningful way ( there's a lot we try out and abandon ), even when cheap, the ones we integrate, its a no brainer paying for or bumping up to the next tier as we use it more.

dt3ft 6y ago

I used to offer a free plan on https://pdf2qrcode.com https://pdf2qrcode.com but not anymore since it costs to have free users and I did not see any conversions into a paid plan. Replaced with a 60 day free trial and it gets the job done.

TalebKabbara 6y ago
Hi, could you please elaborate on “it costs to have free users”? What kind of costs?

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

Jira is one of those products, but an even bigger one (I think?) that I've seen in multiple places is Slack. I don't know if my experience is universal, but in multiple workplaces I've been at, people started using Slack (the free plan) as a grassroots / from the trenches / heck trying to get corporate approval movement; they just started using it and it spread among people, until at some point it gained critical mass, the limits became annoying, and they finally get leadership buy-in.

ohazi 6y ago

You recommended JIRA? To someone that you don't hate?

alexhutcheson 6y ago
If you use it as a full project management tool it can be a bit painful, but is there a better tool you’d recommend for someone who just wants a good bug tracker?

polote 6y ago

You can't just tell, I've used the product for free and I've recommended the product to paying customers so that it's worth it. How much do you cost the company by using the software for free? How much cost the thousands of users that use the product for free and don't recommend it to paying users? Free plan doesn't have a one sided answer. Sometimes it is a good idea, sometimes it is not. Would Salesforce benefit from having a fee plan? This is not obvious to me