For a long time I went back and forth on whether I should do a freemium plan for my SaaS startup[1]. It was a difficult decision considering many of my competit

For a long time I went back and forth on whether I should do a freemium plan for my SaaS startup[1]. It was a difficult decision considering many of my competitors are freemium and I see they enjoy certain benefits from that e.g. a large userbase of fans that help them to market the product indirectly. I finally decided against it based on: 1) Free users would increase support costs / required resources, possibly to the detriment of support quality for paying customers. 2) My SaaS startup is a "lifestyle" business and I'm fine with a slow, steady growth of exclusively paid customers. I don't have an investor breathing down my neck looking for "explosive" growth. 3) It complicates the product roadmap. It's much more focused to have a paid product that gets incremental upgrades, than to have to manage between free and paid feature-sets and continually evaluate whether a new feature is something that everyone gets or just the paid folks. Makes my head spin just thinking about that. 4) Revenue is a pretty nice thing to have. [1] http://www.beatrixapp.com http://www.beatrixapp.com