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
That is the golden question every builder faces!
With my app, I’ve always followed a simple rule: The free version must be valuable enough to use without feeling constant frustration.
I believe that if you provide a 'decent' baseline experience where the user can actually feel the benefit, you build real trust. Users who are ready to invest in their growth will still upgrade to the premium features for the full experience, but they do it because they love the product, not because they are forced by a paywall.
For me, it’s about generosity as a marketing strategy. If the free part is great, the paid part must be amazing.
Good luck with your decision!
I see a lot of apps these days with free tiers that are not useful. I try the free tier to figure out if it's useful, realize there are no useful features in the free tier, get frustrated and uninstall. I think a free trial or a proper demo and a hard paywall is the way to go.
Great question. My rule of thumb has been: free tier should solve the problem once or twice, paid tier removes the friction at scale. The free stuff has to actually work, not be a crippled demo, otherwise people bounce before they trust you. Curious how others handle the "too generous" trap though — anyone found a clean signal that you've gone too far?
The way you described your own content strategy actually nails it, give enough to build trust, hold back enough to create a reason to pay. Most builders just need to ask, would someone pay for this or are they only using it because it's free? very different users.
If I'm doing freemium, I like for the free version to be genuinely useful to my audience.
Too many people publish completely useless versions of their thing as the "free version" which I find incredibly off-putting.
As for paid features, I try to think of enhancements that not everyone will need, but that those who do need it will be willing to pay for, e.g. stuff that will help them use the product to make more money, upsell their clients, or similar.
Team/collab features are usually paid; the single-user core should stay free.
How about asking the question: "Would a free user still recommend this to a friend?"
If yes, the free tier is doing its job. If no, that means either locked too much behind the paywall or built the wrong thing entirely.
For Disciplines, I drew a clear line: anything a basic productivity app already does is free. Tasks, habits, goals. No restrictions.
But the features that make Disciplines actually different, focus sessions with real app blocking, app limits, and productivity analytics, those are paid. The logic was simple: if someone else already offers it for free, I can't charge for it. But if it's exclusive to my app and solves a problem nobody else is solving, that's where the value lives.
The tricky part was resisting the urge to lock basic features behind a paywall to force upgrades. I think that destroys trust. Let people fall in love with the system first, then show them what Pro unlocks.
Launching on Product Hunt on Monday if anyone wants to follow along 👀
I think it's to do with barriers to entry. So I want to get our product on as many servers as possible, so it has to have value in the free version, then we have paid things that are of real value to the enterprise.
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Interesting discussion. To me, whether a product should be free or paid depends on how you define its value.
I usually think about it in two ways. One is to keep the basics free and charge for what is uniquely yours. That can work well, but it becomes fragile if your differentiators are easy for others to copy.
The other is to treat the whole product as the value. If what users are really paying for is the complete experience rather than any single feature, a fully paid model can make perfect sense.
A rough analogy that comes to mind is the history of macOS upgrades. At one point, people were willing to pay for the software experience itself because it was a major part of the value. Over time, that shifted, and the operating system stopped feeling like something people wanted to buy on its own. The value moved elsewhere, and Apple adjusted accordingly.
Maybe there is something useful in that framing.