What an odd article/website. While deciding against offering a free plan is a (reasonable) choice that is made by many SaaS products, it's obviously not a blank

What an odd article/website. While deciding against offering a free plan is a (reasonable) choice that is made by many SaaS products, it's obviously not a blanket thing everyone needs to follow. Free plans in SaaS products are to get people to evaluate/for marketing data and to hopefully ultimately lead free users to one of the paid plans (or drive some other revenue source, e.g. advertising). I think this is quite well known by now? Perhaps the author needs to capitalise more on what their business gets out of the free plan (e.g. marketing data), and work on converting that into to more paying customers. The DO $5 vs $500 comparison is odd as well. Maybe you would be able to spend less support time per customer. But what DO offers is pretty much a commodity by now. If DO no longer offered anything under $500/month... well, it's not that hard to figure out what would happen. The article goes on discuss alternatives, but while these solve some free-plan problems, these have other problems: - trial periods means you will probably put people off sign up, because they are waiting for a 30 day period where they think they will have enough time to try it out - free for FOSS/education/charity means you have to spend time deciding and justify who gets it and who doesn't - lifetime try-out plan eliminates recurring revenue, which is kind of a big thing for SaaS products... And then to top it off, at the bottom there is a link to the author's "Friendly Captcha" project, which alongside more paid plans with more features and limits, has... a free plan!