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
Murror
building a loneliness app (Murror) and this question is genuinely hard for us. the core value is connection and feeling understood, which is hard to gate without it feeling cruel. what we keep coming back to is: free should be enough to feel the thing, not just a taste. if someone tries it for a week and leaves still lonely, that's a product failure not a conversion opportunity. so for us free = enough depth to feel real, paid = continuity, memory, the relationship growing over time. still figuring it out honestly.
Everything should be free! 😄 but costs come in between.
I think free works best when the value isn’t immediately obvious. People need to actually use the product to understand if it’s worth it especially in something like dev tools or infra where the benefit shows up over the time.
But free should be genuinely usable and not hit a gate immediately. If users can't do anything meaningful, it feels like a trick.
In our case at RedirHub, it’s a bit different. Most users don’t wake up thinking about redirects. It’s something that suddenly becomes important, like during a website migration or a marketing campaign. When that moment comes, the need is immediate. They just want something that works. Most don’t really care how it works under the hood.
So for us, free has to remove friction completely. It has to let them solve the problem right away without thinking too much. If they hit limits too early, they’ll just leave for a competitor.
At the same time, we still need to keep the lights on. So the idea is to let users actually complete a real task for free, not just try the product.
For example, we expanded our free plan to support full website migrations. You can move your entire site and be done. No catch. But once that’s done and things start growing, users naturally begin to care about analytics, monitoring, or scaling, and that’s where paid fits in. You can see our launch here if interested - https://www.producthunt.com/products/redirhub-url-redirector-and-tracker?launch=redirhub-website-migration
So for me it’s less about gating features and more about timing.
free = solve the immediate problem, usable
paid = support what comes after
Also saw an interesting counterexample recently. I used a resume builder that offered one free resume creation with all features. Sounds great but realistically most people only need one resume and can just keep updating it. So the free plan basically gives away the entire value of the product, and there's no real reason to ever upgrade. That felf like a case where "free" wasn't thought through properly.
I recently launched a mobile app.
I'm currently covering all costs out of my own pocket - around $50 per month, plus $99 yearly for my Apple dev account. It's not pleasant but it's manageable.
For features that involve more costs on my part, like using an LLM API, I'm using a paywall.
I'm not trying to make money at this point but I am looking for a way to keep my personal costs down.
So the logic I'm following is make features that increase my costs paid features.
Building for service businesses (freelancers, consultants, small shops) so we've gone back and forth on this more times than I'd like to admit.
Where we landed: free has to include whatever it takes to get someone to their first actual win with the product. Not a demo, an actual result. For us that's invoicing and proposals - fully free - because our buyers are cost-sensitive and "trust me it'll save you time" is a bad sales pitch for a $50/month tool.
Early mistake: gating features we thought were the valuable ones. Turned out we were just preventing people from seeing why those features were worth paying for.
I have a rule-of-thumb: offer your best for free, and the paid will follow. As a consultant, I often give my best advice away for free, and the person will remember I provided it to them. Half of the time, it comes back to: "Do this for me and I'll pay you to do it." This can be translated into a product mindset. Provide just enough value for free to showcase the benefits, and they'll eventually come around to paying for more. Then again, it depends on the product or service.
Hey Nika！I don't have my own product either but always provide service about marketing and growth for startup company. Here is what my personal experience and hope to engage more meaning discussion with you.
From my perspective，I don’t think the real question is “How much should be free?”
I think it’s: What should be easy to understand, but hard to replicate?
I totally agree with you that the best free value builds trust.
The best paid value compounds with context, customization, speed, and accountability.
So I’m happy to share ideas for free to various startup and people but the paid layer is where people buy precision, leverage, and a shorter path to the result. @busmark_w_nika