I am very fond of the freemium model, but recently I've been considering that there must be better ways to convert users to profit beyond scaling the number of

I am very fond of the freemium model, but recently I've been considering that there must be better ways to convert users to profit beyond scaling the number of users or adding additional functionality. Have you given much thought to variations on fairly standard business models? We've applied for YC this round, and one of the things we're trying to achieve is to successfully adapt a freemium model for a product that has been traditionally something that customers would pay up front for. The market is already one that is very profitable and our philosophy is that eventually products in our market will be free, so we want to be the ones who give it away first. We want to do this not only to experience the benefits that come with the freemium model (adoption + potential viral growth) but to also help insulate ourselves from competitors doing it to us. Without going into too much detail, after some recent discussion (or perhaps it is just paranoia speaking, this occurred about a week ago) we feel that while a freemium model is still the best framework for our particular concept, it comes with a couple of drawbacks¹ that we hadn't originally conceived, so we have had to think a little outside the box. Right now, we're considering if a hybrid trial/freemium² model might provide us with what we are looking for. Essentially we envision this to be where a user would receive a fully featured product at the start of their product lifecycle, which after awhile degrades into a functionally sound but less featured and free version. The absolute last thing we would want to do is annoy a user by handicapping their product into something unusable. We think this might provide a user more of an incentive to want to upgrade to a paid-for product beyond the simple fact that they have access to more features/bandwidth/data, while still maintaining our core freemium philosophy. Also given the nature of our product, we do have room to add in some further functionality in which the addition of a surcharge on further transactions could be warranted, but we would have to further explore the specifics, so perhaps that is another option available to you? Notes: 1) If PG is reading this and is seriously considering our application and needs to know more about point 1 above, please feel free to email me and I can explain 2) I can't name anyone offhand who is using a trial/freemium hybrid but would love to know if anyone can point me to someone who is using this (or if we're just over engineering the problem).