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
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.
For me the line is blurry and I don't think there's a clean answer. The mental model I keep coming back to is: free should create/show the problem, paid should solve it.
For content/services like yours, free builds the belief and generates the trust that you can help. Paid is the actual help. You're not giving away too much as long as the free stuff makes people want the paid service more, not less.
When I build products I take a similar approach, FREE should be generous enough that users get real value and trust the product, but the moment they want to go deeper, faster, or at scale, that's where paid comes in play.
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@calin_r You are right somewhere in the middle, but when people see me giving so much for free, they expect the rest to be free too :D
@busmark_w_nika Yeah, that's also true. I believe at the end of the day it's a good way to validate whether people pay even after you gave them so much stuff for free and they now expect everything to be free.
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@calin_r There always be people who want things for free :D
@busmark_w_nika Yep, that's spot on. Do you try to convince them to purchase too? Or do you let them be?
I think the way you described it is actually pretty close to how I look at it too.
For me it comes down to this: the free version should be genuinely useful on its own, not just a teaser. Someone should be able to use it and get real value without feeling forced to upgrade.
The paid side is where you go deeper more control, more power, more customization, or anything that saves serious time. Basically the stuff that moves from “this is nice to have” to “I actually rely on this.”
I also try to think in terms of respect. If people feel like you’re holding back basic functionality just to push a subscription, they’ll bounce. But if they feel like the free version helped them and the paid version just makes their life easier, they’re way more open to it.
It’s definitely a balance though. Still figuring that line out myself.
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@zerodarkhub For products, it is easier determine that line compared to content and services tho.
Starnus
@busmark_w_nika IMO everything must contribute to the main business pipeline, even "free" stuff, are serving the "paid" parts. So, any part that is desired by many, won't put a lot of cost on your table, and can act as "lead magnet" can be free, but well attached to the rest of the paid services/features, so it can convert users to paid clients.
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@khashayar_mansourizadeh1 when it comes to lead magnets – it is its purpose to be free, but leading to a paid service (or even that lead magnet is not completely free – it is a sort of transaction, e.g. you need to give them your email).
Starnus
@busmark_w_nika Exactly, I think there should be a dedicated product that can design your lead magnets for you with tons of great templates to be used for free (or small fee)
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.
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@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.
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.
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@indu_thangamuthu yep, more people described that like this!
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.