Freemium or Trial - Lesson learned form Bitbuckets model.

Yesterday, I wrote about the Bitbuckets Issue feature and how we have adapted it to our workflow.

It got me thinking about the pricing models and how we have implemented our pricing.

Pricing Model #1 - Free forever account!

It has been one of my must haves for this Meribook project - Free Forever Account with 3 books, and that's because of the nature of the product.

Books, writing, documenting activity is of a very personal nature, because it requires total attention.  Our thought is that maybe sometime during this intense and immersive activity our users will have that 'Aha' moment interacting with our product.  At that moment, the user will see the value without having to be sold to.

This 'Aha' moment cannot be constrained by an artificial limited-time trial, and hence for Meribook the decision was made to keep it free forever.  So, that's our reason to offer the Free Forever account, and in that process If I can prove to the user the value they can gain is superior to other free and paid SaaS products, then we have done our job.

Benefits for free forever model

Showing your users the value of your 'paid' product is much easier to prove because your users already trust your brand and the quality you produce is known.

The goodwill, testimonials, word of mouth referrals are all other aspects that when taken into consideration make it a no brainer to implement Free forever accounts at least for our core Meribook feature.

Alternative Opinion:

I want to point this great article out to make you think about what might work for you.

http://sixteenventures.com/freemium-free-trials

In the above blog post, the author Lincoln Murphy mentions -  And if you have a Free Trial that ‘downgrades’ to the Freemium version if they don’t convert... why just let them hang out as a free user – after they didn’t become a customer the first time around – and waste resources?

I think the above needs to be considered based on your product.

What I learned from Bitbuckets free forever model

Now, in terms of Bitbucket, the Free forever model has shown me another aspect - teaching users, letting them learn and adapt at their own pace and as the value becomes evident the upgrade to premium is going to happen.

Pricing Model #2: Free Trials!

The second pricing model is the ‘free-trial’ and it has its own place. 

As you can imagine there is no one pricing model for everything.  It depends on the product.  

We are using free-trial on our Meribook connect offering.

Meribook "connect' is geared towards generating leads, or to put it another way, it helps in the ‘Distribution’ aspect of your Meribook experience.  Yep, the Document. Distribute. Profit aspects of Meribook. 

For a Lead capture product like this, a 30 day trial is sufficient time to implement and test.  

You see, a campaign which by its inherent character is limited to a very specific time, so setting a trial offer of 30 days for Meribook Connect makes sense.

So it makes sense to use Trial offer here.

That's it folks, that's how I understand "Freemium" or "Free Trial" hope it helps others who are contemplating which goes where.

I'll be posting a video on Meribook Connect soon, so you can find out why we call it the PDF eBook Killer!

So watch out for that blog post next.