I would say that statement is incorrect. In many ways it depends on your SAAS product's economy. Having free users have it's own benefits: 1) You can consider t

I would say that statement is incorrect. In many ways it depends on your SAAS product's economy. Having free users have it's own benefits: 1) You can consider them as beta-testers as they will help you find issues with product faster 2) The most critical users frequently covert to evangelists if you listen to them (considering their "demands" are reasonable) 2.1) It's really useful to have active community around your product for different reasons. And it might be hard to do with corporate users for example :) 3) Access doesn't have to be completely free. You can make them hoop through some loops - sharing about SAAS on social networks, inviting friends and so on. 4) Frequently you can actually convert a decent amount of free users with good discounts. Longer people use your service the higher is gonna be the conversion rate. In general discounts ain't a good solution, but a lot of people don't actually need your software - they see a good deal for some interesting product and buy it in reserve for the future. I think a lot of us been there with all deals on Steam, having hundreds of games in a library you haven't and probably won't play :) 5) Many users are actually ready to pay for some kind of support if it's not too expensive. But if you built a decent community around your product your free users can frequently get help they need on your forum or some board. 6) As others said frequently previous personal experience really helps with onboarding so there is a higher chance somebody gonna recommend it to their companies. There are gonna be other benefits as well too. Personally I have around 10 years in product marketing management and development in Russia and USA. And as some of our products were Shareware I must say the biggest problem in ex-USSR countries was always a huge amount of pirates, but from my experience if you play it right you can use even them as huge promotional channel. P.S. Getting a good "PR" manager is a good thing too. Frequently you can contact people who are vocal and berating your product and just give them access to Premium features for free :) You won't receive money from them, but having less negative reviews will help your sales. Frequently they would appreciate the gesture and make favorable recommendations. (In many times people just are unhappy with something else in their lives, they just project negativity on your product cause they are in a bad place and getting a response from a real human means a lot to people - if it's not just some "sorry script" many customer support agents use).