How to increase sales of your product that has many free users but only a few paying ones?
For over a week, the wider Product Hunt community has been chiming in with their “two cents” in the discussion about where to draw the line between which product features should be free and which should require payment.
Just yesterday on X, a post started trending about a tool with 35,000+ users, but only just over 1,300 paying customers. The founder was asking the community for advice on how to increase conversions.
Many people had a very straightforward opinion: remove the free version (but this isn’t the path he wants to take).
Possible solutions include:
Free users could be required to have a badge on their profile promoting the brand. (though this can’t be applied to every business, but he is considering this one)
Showing ads in the free tool. (invasive, but can at least cover some costs; downside: the tool may feel sluggish)
Removing the free plan completely – this could work if users have been accustomed to the tool long enough. (CapCut did it like that.)
What tricks would you use to convert free users into paying customers?
Replies
Not me curiously waiting for the comments 😆
minimalist phone: creating folders
@ruxandra_mazilu You are not alone here. I would like to know that top secret ingredient too :D
Feels less like a pricing problem and more like a value gap. A lot of free users never reach a point where the product becomes something they rely on, so there’s no real reason to pay.
I’d start by looking at what paying users do early on that free users don’t. What actions they take, what they complete and where free users drop off before getting there.
Instead of removing the free plan, I’d tighten the path to that first meaningful outcome and gate what comes after it. Once someone reaches value, the conversion decision becomes much easier.
minimalist phone: creating folders
@arun_tamang how would you spot those patterns? Through heatmaps and mixpanel events?
@busmark_w_nika I usually don’t start with tools. I’ll take a few recent users and try to reconstruct their first session. What they were trying to do, where they clicked, how far they got and where things stopped making sense. Sometimes that’s from quick user conversations, sometimes from watching a few session recordings.
You don’t get perfect data this way, but patterns show up pretty quickly. There’s usually a point paying users get through that others don’t. Once that’s clear, tools just help validate it at scale.
From what I’ve seen, conversions jump when you gate outcomes, not features — let users get value for free, but charge when they want speed, scale, or real results.
minimalist phone: creating folders
@allinonetools_net But they need to be very used to the new product :)