How do you decide what features should be free and what should be paid?

The way we think about it at PrometAI: free should solve a real problem on its own, not just hint at one. If the free tier feels like a demo, users churn before they ever see the value.

The line we drew was between breadth and depth. Broad access is free. The deeper the output, the more it becomes a paid feature. That way someone can get genuine value without paying, but scaling that value requires upgrading.

The "giving too much away" anxiety is real, but in practice most people don't convert because of what they got for free. They convert because they trust the product enough to pay. Free builds that trust.

I'm Narek, co-founder of PrometAI. We built an AI business planning platform trusted by 100,000+ founders worldwide. From idea validation to financial projections, we guide the whole journey. Relaunching on PH soon! Follow along if that sounds interesting. Let's connect!

Simple framework we use at ReadyPermit.ai:

Give away the thing that creates the "oh crap" moment for free. Charge for the solution.

Our free flood zone checker tells homeowners if their property is in a flood zone. Takes 20 seconds. Free, no signup.

The "oh crap I'm in a flood zone" moment? That's when they want the full property report — zoning, buildability, environmental risk. That's paid.

Free tool = trust + traffic. Paid report = revenue.

The mistake most people make: they gate the awareness. Don't. Gate the action.

Simple framework: give away what creates the "aha moment." Charge for what creates the outcome.

We give the first report free. It takes 20 seconds. The user sees exactly what they'd pay a consultant $3,500 for. That's the aha.

The paid version? More reports, deeper analysis, API access. That's the outcome -- they're now making money decisions with it.

Free should make people feel stupid for not paying. If your free tier doesn't sell your paid tier, it's not generous enough.

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

The best way to do this is to test it. Often, when a product is being built, whether an app, SaaS, etc. it is essential to give your best input away for free. I had a startup back in 2017 that, after 2 years of development, ended up with my partner placing a paywall before access could be given. We received no signups. I resigned. Point is, when in the startup phase, it is best to give away what you have to gain traction, and focus on monetization later on.

Building something is a process, as you know, and iteration is part of it. Just as you test product features, you should test product pricing :)