I think the 2 approaches can be segmented based on market appeal. Canva, figma, and some of the other examples being thrown around are products with mass appeal

I think the 2 approaches can be segmented based on market appeal. Canva, figma, and some of the other examples being thrown around are products with mass appeal. Also products that I imagine don’t really require much customer service. As it’s expected you figure it out yourself with these products. The dev focused tools, a la the indie hacker type, are usually after some very niche user. In this case, you should just make the user pay. There’s not many of them anyways and you can likely command a higher prices because you’re essentially solving a problem that would require them to solve (expensive) or just keep status quo in place (eg manual process). This is how I like to think about freemium anyways. If product has mass appeal, eg bookkeeping, then freemium makes sense. If it’s bespoke compliance software tailored just for veterinary hospitals then everyone pays