I can see what you mean. That was really not the intent. The feedback that we received when we first launched the product mattered a lot, and this was meant as a way to acknowledge it. Sorry if it came across that way.
If it's a B2C model, then ad-supported might be the way to go, but if it's B2B, there are lots and lots of great examples of making things work. You definitely need to figure out the math about the incremental cost of additional free users vs. the margin generated by those that pay. But assuming the math holds, the product-led model works wonders.
From Zoom to Calendly, from HubSpot to Monday.com, the free tier generates an enormous user base that leads not only to upgrades, but also to a fantastic feedback loop that makes the product stronger and stronger.
In the space where we operate - the democratization of design - the most successful example is by far Canva. It has over 99% of users that are on the free plan, but with 60m users, that 1% is golden, and generates $1b in ARR. Melanie Perkins recently shared some of those numbers and their journey here: https://medium.com/canva/a-note-to-the-canva-community-1d4b0...
So, in the end, it's all about making sure that small % of customers that ARE willing to pay, pay you enough to make it all work. It sounds obvious, but it takes a lot of time to figure it out (we certainly do not have all the answers yet, even after 7 years). But here's the key: among the large amount of free users lies the very audience you need to listen to in order to determine what people are willing to pay for. That discovery process ends up being the game changer.
Yes, you're right on. But in those 5.2 million sessions there's everything, including the many applications that use our embeddable editors free of charge.
So, it's a cool metric, but it doesn't tell the complete story.
Actual monthly ARPA at BEE is around $27 for our BEE Pro product (hosted email & page design suite) and over $600 for our BEE Plugin offering (embeddable email, landing page & popup builder).
No, the model is the product-led growth model. For example, take our BEE Pro product: we do tens of thousands of monthly users of the free editor at beefree.io, of which over 10,000 become free trial users of BEE Pro every month, and of them hundreds convert into paying customers, every month.
Similarly with our embeddable visual builders: you can get started completely free of charge, then move up to a paid plan when you need more. And with this product there are actually many that "need more" from the get-go, so they get in touch with our sales team to make sure that the product is a good fit, do a proof-of-concept at no charge, and then go live.
Thank you so much for sharing the ballpark numbers/percentages of the free->paid funnel. I'm not starting a competing mail application (haha) so my use case might be different but it's very useful for comparison.
We believe in reducing to a minimum the friction to get started. So, I seriously doubt that we will ever have a paywall to get going.
In fact, it's more likely that we double-down on free access going forward: the revenue comes (and will continue to come) from those that need more. When you need "more", you're typically willing & happy to pay for it. Pretty much as simple as that :-)
We literally re-wrote the whole thing from the ground up 3 times LOL. At the start it was a JS app built with Jquery. Then we moved to AngularJS (1.x). Finally we decided to rewrite it again with React. A lot of Python in the backend.
There are so many, but a key one is that reducing the distance between what you created, and the people for whom you created it, really does pay off: more adoption, more feedback, more clarity on what's going on. Call it product-led growth, call it removing friction, or whatever else. If you're interested on that concept, here are some more thoughts: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/less-friction-key-massimo-arr...
Thanks so much for the kind note. Yes, my intention was precisely to celebrate the positive impact that the original thread on HN (exactly 7 years ago today!!) had on our business, as we were just getting started. This is not "bs", we're truly grateful.
