a. does not cannibalize sales transactions.
b. does not have design incentives to be delibrately
bad/frustrating/incomplete
c. does not allow the creation of bad business metrics
like "Look how many free users it has!"
d. *does* create a virtuous cycle where there is revenue
for support and maintenance proportional to its use.
The free tier of a paid product does the opposite of each. Not only is the paid tier "competing with free" the company itself is actively anchoring the price to 0€.1. 10,000 free users and 1000 paid users means supporting 11,000 users on the revenue from 1000 (and that's assuming an optimistic 9% conversion rate and an optimistic 1000 users). With the current pricing that's less than 50k a year before expenses.
2. The revenue model in #\1 suggests a significant probability that the business will be underfunded. Underfunded businesses tend toward ceasing operations. I mean if the business gets to 1000 paid accounts a year from now at a steady rate, that's only 25k in the first year.
3. Where I am going is that the as a business proposition, if it is worth investing the time in building and managing a website on PageRocket, then it is probably worth 50€ a month and with 50€ a month per paid account, there is money to run a business and incentives to make the product worth 50€ a month or 100 or 200.
Of course, if the goal is passive income, then that's a different model.
4. There was an interview with Jeff Atwood (I think on Hanselminutes but maybe Software Engineering Daily) where he described the three things a landing page has to do. The two I remember are it has to tell people 'what it is' and 'why the person should care'. A lot of goes in to those will be subject to interpretation by the visitor. "Oh a box to type in my email address" leads to a lot of quick assumptions that it is probably better not to have people make.