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 think the hardest part is not defining free vs paid but resisting the urge to over explain everything for free once you know the answer.
This is something both creators and founders struggle with .The boundary between helpful for free and “valuable enough to charge” is always moving.
How did you guys get your first clients on your first apps?
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@mokgelemokoena Started yapping about them on the internet :D
@busmark_w_nika lol ill definetly try that.
The framework I've landed on after building a few developer tools: free features should create the habit, paid features should save meaningful time.
For AI-powered tools specifically, the free tier needs to be genuinely useful — not a teaser. If someone uses the free version and thinks "this is nice but I wish it could do X," you've found your paywall. But if they think "this doesn't actually help me," they'll never convert.
The mistake I see most often: putting the "wow" moment behind the paywall. The wow moment should be free. The "I need this every day" moment is what people pay for.
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@ethanfrostlove the problem is that people usually have only one "wow" moment and then do not know what to put behind the paywall :D
We made the classifier completely free — no signup. It generates leads because people share results. The paid layer is the gap analysis and documents
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@pavel_build Is there any way you can track those paid users who subscribed just because some free user referenced the product?
@busmark_w_nika Good question — we track it through referral source on signup. When someone shares their classifier result, the link contains a ref parameter. If the person who clicks it signs up for paid, we can connect the chain. It's not perfect but gives a rough attribution. The bigger signal is just watching what content drives signups — the free classifier result pages convert much better than the homepage.
TapRefer
I'm going with a 3-day free trial and then paid. In those 3 days, many users recover their yearly costs too. It's all about value, if a free service is too generic, it becomes useless. People pay when a service can make them more money or save time.
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@jiteshghanchiIt could be a solution, but here's the thing: I often sign up for something but don't have time to use it within the first 3 days. When I circle back to try it 10 days later (when I really have time), the trial has already expired.
Maybe A/B testing day-based trials versus usage-based (like using units) trials would be an interesting experiment :)
TapRefer
@busmark_w_nika Yes, credit-based trials work.
However, they can make users lazy.
To validate a product faster, time-based trials work better because they prove the product is a "painkiller."
If a user only returns after 10 days, then it is a "vitamin" product.
That is why time-based trials are the industry standard. major companies invest heavily in R&D, human psychology, and A/B testing to prove it.
Im building an ecosystem of apps and I've built my first product almost launch ready. It won't have a free tier but a 7 day free trial and after that a subscription. Pay gating adds a lot complexity to setting up onboarding and paywall so I chose the shortest way to market. Interesting to see how that works with my project.
Capso
We took the opposite approach with Capso (our macOS screenshot and recording tool): everything free, no tiers at all. The thinking was that some paid tools features that should just work for anyone. Going fully open source meant our growth had to come from the product genuinely being better, not from locking things behind a paywall. The hard part is you lose freemium as a conversion lever entirely. Every user you win has to come from the product being worth it. It's a high bar, but an honest one.
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@lzhgus So how is it now? Do you sell your product, or is it free and open-sourced?
Capso
@busmark_w_nika Thanks for asking, Capso is currently free and open source. I also want to clarify that I wasn’t trying to compare ourselves negatively with other teams or products. Different products have different business models, and I respect that. For us, open source and no paywalls felt like the right way to build Capso, and we hope the product can speak for itself over time. Some features, like cloud sync, may depend on external providers, so we’re exploring ways to let users integrate the services they prefer.
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@lzhgus Okay, but... how do you finance it? How do you earn money from this? You need to live from something.
AdFox (formerly GoodsFox)
A simple way to think about it:
Free = value preview
Paid = real outcomes
Free helps users understand the product and get small wins.
Paid is where they get depth, scale, and tailored results.
Your approach is spot on:
General advice = free
Specific, personalized solutions = paid
If users see value but still hit a natural limit, you’ve got the balance right.
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@janicelewis00 That's for sure, but some people are like: Just a quick question (I answer this), and they will start taking my time asking a trillion questions. It is difficult to ignore after I approved their first message :D
As a founder, I try to separate discovery value from operational value.
Free should let users understand the product, test it properly, and see whether it solves a real problem. Paid should begin where the product starts delivering ongoing business value — more scale, more reliability, more control, or features that matter in production.
I think the biggest mistake is making the free version too weak. If users can’t experience the real value, they don’t convert because they never truly understood the product in the first place.
So my rule is:
free = evaluation and early use
paid = production use and business-critical value
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@konstantin_gerasimenko But with services or content, it is harder to determine what was "weak" to convince.