We have a free plan on our B2B SaaS. We don't experience the issue of entitled free users clogging up our support pipeline at all (despite having tens of thousa

We have a free plan on our B2B SaaS. We don't experience the issue of entitled free users clogging up our support pipeline at all (despite having tens of thousands of users, 3/4ths of which are free). Maybe we've just been lucky enough to iron out most of the UX kinks enough that most users just won't need help? The real downside to a free plan as I see it is that you're effectively building two products - first a free one that needs to be good enough to get attention in the marketplace, and then a paid one that needs to be sufficiently much better to justify upgrading. That takes a while when you're bootstrapping, and you might not have the runway to execute all that. But the upside is that our free plan is a massive part of our marketing strategy, it's scalable and it's "pay once" (server costs are negligible for us, so it mainly cost us in development time). Our product is B2B, so isn't suited for a Dropbox/Airbnb-style referral system, but the app marketplaces that we integrate with (G Suite and Slack) grant visibility based on active users (and on G Suite also positive reviews), which we have 4 times more of than we would without the free users. It's much, much better for us that someone uses our free tier, than that they use a competitor. Used this way, a free plan is effectively a way to turn engineering/product dev hours into marketing - that might not be a good tradeoff for everyone, but it's been great for us.