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> Tailscale’s free plan is free because we keep our scaling costs low relative to typical SaaS companies. Well no, Tailscale's free plan is free because this i

by polote 5y ago

> Tailscale’s free plan is free because we keep our scaling costs low relative to typical SaaS companies. Well no, Tailscale's free plan is free because this is a user acquiring strategy (as it is described later in the article ) not because of your low cost. You could have a higher cost and still be free and typical Saas companies have the exact same reasoning than Tailscale, that's why Notion has a free plan, that's why Cloudflare has a free plan.... That's the whole point of a freemium model. What VC call product led growth. The if you are not paying you are the product is true for free products not for freemium

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lijogdfljk 5y ago
I agree with your statement, but to devils-advocate for a moment the details matter do they not? Ie if your scaling costs are high than wouldn't you need to extract much more from each user than if they are low? Ie high enough and you're doing sketchy shit and selling every ounce of user data you can because you have to recoup some of the user costs. Low enough and users could "just" be a mind-share cost. If true, the devil is really how the user has no information here. All we can do is assume we are the product and they're fully-evil. Unfortunately.
nickysielicki 5y ago
Sure. Fine. They’re solving a problem that, in the past, has caused me to be dramatically less productive. I set up Tailscale on all my devices in 20 minutes. It’s like magic. You can bet that the next time I’m working somewhere and we face a problem Tailscale solves, I’m going to advocate to use it.
- atonse 5y ago
  Same here. It was a no brainer to switch my company to TS from vanilla WireGuard.
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nerdyadventurer 5y ago
I think it is important to keep free plan costs low since conversion rate from Free to Paid plan is very low as I heard from a interview with Todoist CEO. I wonder how companies split their features among pricing tiers? what is the right feature split between free and paid (in the context of B2C)?

by polote 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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lijogdfljk 5y ago

I agree with your statement, but to devils-advocate for a moment the details matter do they not? Ie if your scaling costs are high than wouldn't you need to extract much more from each user than if they are low? Ie high enough and you're doing sketchy shit and selling every ounce of user data you can because you have to recoup some of the user costs. Low enough and users could "just" be a mind-share cost. If true, the devil is really how the user has no information here. All we can do is assume we are the product and they're fully-evil. Unfortunately.

nickysielicki 5y ago

Sure. Fine. They’re solving a problem that, in the past, has caused me to be dramatically less productive. I set up Tailscale on all my devices in 20 minutes. It’s like magic. You can bet that the next time I’m working somewhere and we face a problem Tailscale solves, I’m going to advocate to use it.

atonse 5y ago
Same here. It was a no brainer to switch my company to TS from vanilla WireGuard.

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nerdyadventurer 5y ago

I think it is important to keep free plan costs low since conversion rate from Free to Paid plan is very low as I heard from a interview with Todoist CEO. I wonder how companies split their features among pricing tiers? what is the right feature split between free and paid (in the context of B2C)?