Maybe you can have procedures in place to let approved accounts stay on a free plan. If you have a user with a long track record of acceptable use, and they really want their free account, why not give it to them? You could limit this to a small user pool, say, accounts open for > 1 year and exclude all new users. It might be a fun way to reward your longtime users and develop some loyalty.
That's a very nice idea! Maybe we'll just upgrade our longterm fans or something like that. Thanks for that; we'll go think what we can do in that direction.
Why? Think about it. You charge one lousy euro a month. That's nothing. If people are long-term users, they get a lot of value out of your service. Why shouldn't they pay for it? If the service provides value to them, they'll pay. If it doesn't, they don't add anything to your business anyways. This leads to a very one-sided business relationship, if users want your service but don't want to pay for it. It's like they're saying:"You're not worth it."
Maybe automatically upgrade long term accounts and allow shorter term accounts to apply for approval until some deadline. After the deadline, allow access to content already uploaded on non-upgraded existing accounts, but not new uploads. That way, everybody gets treated fairly, but not equally.
The mistake would be to upset people who have trusted your brand.
That makes a lot of sense. This company should get their programmers on this so they can post a quick followup to respond to any backlash. It's clear from this Ask HN the founders really do care and want to make people happy, so they could issue a blog post to that effect if it's needed.
Maybe you can have procedures in place to let approved accounts stay on a free plan. If you have a user with a long track record of acceptable use, and they really want their free account, why not give it to them? You could limit this to a small user pool, say, accounts open for > 1 year and exclude all new users. It might be a fun way to reward your longtime users and develop some loyalty.