How do you decide what features should be free and what should be paid?
Let me start from the creator’s perspective:
I personally don’t have a product (apart from hiring people for creative work or offering personal consultations).
But as a creator, I constantly share content, insights, and information, value that helps me build trust (for free). Based on that perceived expertise, people eventually decide to work with me (a paid service).
So some things I share for free to eventually move toward a paid collaboration.
Personally, it’s sometimes hard to judge when I might be giving away too much for free.
And I assume it’s similarly tricky for builders.
You want users to try the product, but then comes the question of paid features, or a trial limited by time or usage.
How do you decide which parts of your product or service remain free, and which become paid?
When I share content publicly, I usually provide generalised advice. But when it comes to a specific case or a tailored strategy that requires a personal approach, that’s where it becomes paid.
Replies
I'm running into this decision now. I do want a free tier to keep the barrier to entry as low as possible. Then making as many of the features available to all users, but then restricting some of those features to a point where you can play around with them, but to be truly useful you'll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
But it's important to me that the product is still really useful as a free product, so that people will spread the word as well.
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@melvin_valster what is the product?
@busmark_w_nika it’s an ai-first recipe manager app, with meal planning, shopping lists, focused cooking mode, all with a beautiful aesthetic and delightful UX. It’s called Daily Simmer 😊
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@melvin_valster Launch when? 👀
This is a great way to frame it — and I’ve been thinking about this a lot while building.
For me, the line comes down to:
👉 free = insight
👉 paid = advantage
If someone can still get value and make decisions with the free version, that builds trust.
But if they want:
• speed
• better filtering
• higher-quality signals
—that’s where it becomes worth paying for.
I think the mistake is when free is either:
too weak → no one cares
too strong → no reason to upgrade
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@food_of_pluto For services, it is even more difficult to outline the line
@busmark_w_nika What are some things that feel difficult to decide over?
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@food_of_pluto Well, for some people, even consultation is a paid service, so you can limit the free option only to a 10 – 15 min intro call, but the rest would probably be paid. It is questionable how much value you can provide in 15 min. Usually, only 5 minutes is for greetings and basic info about the customer.
I have a very generous freemium set up. For the paid version, it's all about power users: when they want to use more of the tool, they pay for it to unlock it. Unfortunately, it means a lot of users, not many willing to pay. I was considering an offer for 100 users or so for X price forever... but the app is hard to maintain to sustain it with that.
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@norteapp How many features are free vs. paid (ratio)?
@busmark_w_nika All features are available for paid and free, the key is amounts.
Users get 10 messages with the AI assistant for free, 100 when premium.
Users get to save 2 cards for free, 10 for premium... If I want to monetize more I would need to limit more the free version, but i want to see return usage and make the overall app more valuable first.
This is very critical point, I believe also it comes from the pricing strategy and the type of the product. SaaS for example with Freemium model, normally any features that is in the core workflow of your users should be priced and offering free features that help and improve the end-to-end experience but is not the core one.
Also, you can offer high-used feature on usage level like number of analyzing documents is X and after X you need to upgrade to create the hook
There are a lot of criteria and factors that help you decide but I think it should start from startup and product vision, then your pricing strategy and moving forward
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@ayman_elafifi1 ofc, I want to offer some features for free, enough for people to experience the product and make it useful for them, and when they want more value, then, voilà, paywall :D
@busmark_w_nika this is a very good tactic btw :), how can you handle this in the AI era where tokenization is part of your pricing decision?
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@ayman_elafifi1 what exactly do you mean? Because my product will not be an AI-powered solution. No tokens used, so I will not have cost for that :)
@busmark_w_nika aha, your point is valid in that type of products. I worked on SaaS B2B for retail and that was the tactic where we offer limited number of usage and if you want more you should pay because we build the sickness over the users' habit of using our product
Great question.
My rule is usually simple:
free = enough value to create trust
paid = the part that creates direct outcome, saves serious time, or removes complexity
People should be able to feel the value before paying. But the real transformation / execution is where paid usually starts. For builders, I think the hardest part is not “what can I charge for?”
It’s what should stay frictionless so adoption can happen first.
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@mikita_aliaksandrovich Thanks for your POV.
As a new developer in the Crypto Tax space promoting Privacy - full disclosure is important to me. Therefor, providing users a privacy policy and access to all their calculations and reports is free. The only paid part of the app is printing final report PDF's and CSV's. They can use the software and manually transfer results to their tax submissions - and test results against their current methods. I am confident once they have all their data encrypted and classified, next year's taxes are a snap using my app. Plus, I am ultra competitive on price and security. For me accuracy matters too - users need to be 100% satisfied before they buy - because that's what I would want.
So - ask yourself the question first - what would I pay for this and where is the benefit? Then, be open with users.
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@robert_vassov I do not know whether you presented it like that, but I have a feeling that you are giving away too much value for free :D IMO, in a tiered offer, there should be more items included.
This is what i consider when i want to determine pricing and free features.
If the components are already free in some products, i usually make them free too, and if i added new features on to them then the new features will be available as a paid option.
Another metric i use is the quantity usage of the feature, the more the usage increases, the more the user will have to pay.
I'm still new to this, so i'm open to recommendations.
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@kutlwano_melamu What is your product? Comparative strategy is good to start with, but what if the product is unique for the category?
@busmark_w_nika I'll be launching soon(I'm still finding my way around product hunt).
That's a good point, hadn't thought of it that way, but if i had to i think it is important that you provide users with ample free usage to highlight the product's utility(just be aware of your finance's bandwidth). If you can not afford to offer free usage, i would advice to use interactive prototypes or videos to improve familiarity with clients.
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@kutlwano_melamu What would those videos promise? I mean... better conversion or?
@busmark_w_nika they help with product awareness, but i'm not convinced that they will definitely lead to conversion. I say this because to convert a user they usually have to develop trust in the product(that it does work as claimed)
I usually think about it like this: free should show the value, paid should deliver the deeper outcome.
Free features should let people understand what the product does and actually get a small win. If users can’t feel the value, they’ll never pay.
Paid features are usually the things that either save a lot of time, unlock more power, or scale the results. Basically the parts that become important once someone is already getting value.
For example:
Free → try the core idea
Paid → do more of it, faster, or with better results
I also try to avoid making the free version feel “crippled.” It should still be genuinely useful. If people like using it, upgrading becomes a natural step instead of a forced one.
It’s definitely a balancing act though sometimes you only figure it out after watching how users actually use the product.
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@sangeet_banerjee IMO, I am on the same page that when you show something for free, it should be high-quality, but it means, you should keep raising bar when people pay :)
One great idea I'm bouncing around at the moment is to offer paid subscription features for free but with limits. I believe the freemium model greatly increases conversions, and you can see examples of this in applications like Vercel / Expo, even Microsoft has a "only pay when you cross a limit" feature.
I think this works great, because it allows users to build up trust as you mentioned Nika, but it also increases the value proposition. I'd be more willing to pay for something personally that's already working for me.
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@minhajulll What will be the "limit?" :)
@busmark_w_nika Like for example: Vercel let's you build websites for free and they will run the hosting but once you hit a certain limit of traffic you have to pay. The same with expo, for more build / faster builds you can pay otherwise you can use the free tier which is just as good. Btw I'm launching tomorrow, would be grateful if you could support :)
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@minhajulll i am gonna support your launch :)
This is a million-dollar question for any creator! Personally, I believe the 'Free' tier should offer enough value to solve a core problem, making the user trust your brand. The 'Paid' tier should then focus on scale, automation, or deeper expertise.
I'm curious, for those of you with SaaS products: Have you ever felt that you gave away 'too much' for free? How did you pivot from that? Would love to learn from your experiences!
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@faisal_ahmed_rony This is maybe a question for someone in the community because I do not have Saas! :D
@busmark_w_nika Haha, fair point, Nika! :D Content and insights are indeed a different ballgame compared to software.