The article misses the biggest reason to offer a free plan. If your competitor has one and you don't, they're the "default" that everyone uses, and nobody bothe

The article misses the biggest reason to offer a free plan. If your competitor has one and you don't, they're the "default" that everyone uses, and nobody bothers looking at your product. Along the same lines, you're probably not entering a completely new business, so you need to give someone a reason to check out your product. The intelligent free plans are the ones that offer some things for free, but they say "If you like what you get in the free plan, you can pay to get X" for some useful X. Evernote did it for years with their free plan. Evernote was THE notes app. Now that they don't really have a free plan any longer, but Notion does, it'll be interesting to see how it works out. But keep in mind that Evernote is an established company, not a startup looking for the first 10 paying customers.