Original Summary

Context first, because the right answer depends on it. Consumer product, unproven core idea, no sales motion, nobody has a budget line for it. If this were B2B with a defined buyer I would not be writing this post, because there you charge early and the price is part of how you qualify people. I had the full billing stack in: subscription, trial, paywall, billing pages, comp flags for friends. I took all of it out before charging anyone. The case for doing that, as I see it. There is exactly one thing I need to know right now, which is whether people come back on day four. With a paywall in the product, every drop off has two possible explanations, price or product, and at low volume you cannot separate them. Ten signups a day will never give you the power to tell those apart, so you end up reasoning from anecdotes, and you pick the flattering anecdote every time. A paywall also changes what you build. Once revenue exists you start defending it. Features get chosen because they look good on an upgrade screen rather than because they make the product work. I did not want that pressure in week one. The third reason is unglamorous. The billing logic was a large share of the complexity, and most of it existed only to answer whether a given person was allowed to see a given screen. That question put a branch in nearly every view. Now the case against, which I would like this sub to make harder than I can make it myself. Free users are not customers. They will tell you what they enjoy, not what they would pay for, and those are different reports. You can run a year of cheerful free usage and learn nothing about whether a business exists. Price is positioning. Free says something about what the thing is worth, and that message is hard to walk back with the cohort that heard it first. Grandfathering is a tax you pay forever. Everyone who arrives before the price expects to be exempt from it, and if you do not exempt them you get a public argument at exactly the wrong moment. If you do exempt them, your best advocates are permanently worth nothing. My working position is that a paywall is a measuring instrument, and you can only afford it once the core loop is proven. Before that it mostly adds noise to the only signal you have. I am not confident about this and it is expensive to be wrong, which is why I would rather hear from people who charged from day one and are glad they did. The specific question I cannot find a straight answer to anywhere: has anyone here run free first, then introduced a price, and come out with clean numbers on what it did to the early cohort? Retention before and after, conversion of the free base, churn among the grandfathered. Opinions on this are everywhere and numbers are not. Disclosure, as the rules ask: the product is mine, a wellbeing app at maii.health. It is free, in the browser, and there is nothing to buy, so this is not a pitch. I am after the counterargument.   submitted by   /u/maii-health [link]   [c

  • 情报分类：商业与市场研究
  • 分类依据：内容涉及商业、投资或市场动态
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SaaS
  • 发布时间：2026/9/18 05:48:46