I'm the founder of Bidsketch and the author of one of the referenced articles.
An often overlooked (and super important) effect of offering a free plan is that it will decrease the number of paid users signing up to your service initially. In other words: you will make less money upfront.
If the free plan is available that's what most people will go for. It seems obvious but it's easily overlooked when trying to calculate whether or not it's worth offering a free plan. If you factor in the initial negative impact of going free as a cost then you're better prepared. Of course, the reason why I wrote the article was that most people (including myself at the time) simply add a free plan because it "works" for [random web 2.0 startup] so they figure it'll work for them too.
That's still model-dependent, I think. If the cost is sufficient barrier to entry that user skepticism remains high, then you'd probably have less initial converts simply by having a smaller pool of potential clients giving you a chance.
An often overlooked (and super important) effect of offering a free plan is that it will decrease the number of paid users signing up to your service initially. In other words: you will make less money upfront.
If the free plan is available that's what most people will go for. It seems obvious but it's easily overlooked when trying to calculate whether or not it's worth offering a free plan. If you factor in the initial negative impact of going free as a cost then you're better prepared. Of course, the reason why I wrote the article was that most people (including myself at the time) simply add a free plan because it "works" for [random web 2.0 startup] so they figure it'll work for them too.