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 have come up with a simple theory. The feature ships for free initially, if it get's adopted then we think of monetising it.
minimalist phone: creating folders
@vu3ozm So you are offering things for free first, and then hide them behind paywall or?
We went through this exact debate at PrometAI, and honestly still revisit it. Our answer was to draw the line at the "aha moment." In our example, the free plan gives you one business plan and 25 AI requests. Enough to see what the product actually does, not enough to run a business on it. That was intentional. If someone can't see the value early, more free features won't change their mind.
minimalist phone: creating folders
@narek_abgaryan 25 is enough to understand and feel the tool. I think there is a huge value you offer :)
Biteme: Calorie Calculator
This is something I think about a lot with Biteme. We went with a freemium model where the core calorie tracking is free but the more advanced features like AI food recognition and detailed macro breakdowns are paid.
My rule of thumb has been: if the feature is what gets someone to try the product, it should be free. If it's what makes them stay and go deeper, that's where the paywall makes sense. You want people to feel the value before you ask them to pay for more of it.
The hardest part is resisting the urge to give away too much early on just to grow faster. I've definitely been guilty of that.
minimalist phone: creating folders
@dan16 Does the AI recongition costs you something as a developer? (tokens) How much is it?
Biteme: Calorie Calculator
@busmark_w_nika Great question! Yeah, it definitely costs us per API call. We use a vision model for food recognition, and each scan runs us a fraction of a cent in tokens. For most users it's fine, but it starts to add up and get close to the cost of the monthly plan if someone is scanning more than 10 images a day.
We actually explored generating custom icons per food item to create a more personalized experience, but that would drastically increase our costs, and we'd have to release a whole new higher-tier plan just to cover it. So for now we're keeping it practical.
That's part of why the advanced AI features sit behind the paid tier. The core calorie tracking and manual logging are free because they cost us essentially nothing to run. But the AI stuff has real infrastructure costs behind it so we had to be thoughtful about where to draw that line. Models keep getting cheaper and better every month, though, so we're always re-evaluating what we can offer.
minimalist phone: creating folders
@gary_espinoza Interesting – what tool do you have?
In the dating space, the free tier needs to be useful enough that people experience real value - seeing profiles, basic searching. But the paid features should solve a specific pain point: video chat, AI coaching, verified profiles. If your free users can't tell you what they're missing, your paywall isn't positioned right.
the real answer nobody here is saying: if your product has variable costs per user (like AI inference), your free tier IS your marketing budget. treat it that way.
i run AI-heavy pipelines and every prompt costs real money. so i structured it as: free tier = enough to hit the wow moment, maybe 5-10 uses. paid = unlimited or high volume. the key insight was tracking exactly where users go from "oh cool" to "i actually need this in my workflow" and putting the gate right after that moment.
what changed everything for me was caching aggressively. i cache outputs with vector similarity search so if someone requests something close to what already exists, i serve the cached version instead of burning another API call. cut my costs by 60-70% overnight. suddenly the free tier became way more generous without actually costing more.
the trial vs freemium debate is a false choice imo. trials work when your product needs time to click (like writing tools or habit apps). freemium works when value is immediate but scales with usage. combining both usually just confuses people about what theyre actually getting.
This is a hard balance.
What’s worked from what I’ve seen is making the free tier valuable enough to build momentum, but not enough to create dependency at scale.
Free = exploration and early wins
Paid = reliability, scale, and deeper control
If someone can achieve their full outcome without ever feeling friction, it’s usually a sign you’re giving away too much.
Well, it's all the goal.
Primary goal : What drives users in and drives them to adopt to the product. Provide the essential features, so users come in and explore the product meaningfully. Let them see the value.
Secondary goal : Once they see the value, they will pay to expand for advanced features, to speed up.
i do ask myself on this as well. What feature should be free and what should be paid. I guess my take is that features who should showcase the initial value of the product should be free. The usage volume should then be paid, as that means that they are recurring users and are using it much more often
what i've seen work: watch what free users do obsessively. the features they keep coming back to, the ones that generate "can i do X?" questions, the stuff that spikes right before churn.