Why We Dropped Our SaaS Free Plan
October 25, 2020
If you are building a SaaS and weighing a free plan against a time-limited trial, this is a write-up of what happened when we did it the first way, why we walked it back, and what we would tell a founder facing the same call today.
What our free plan looked like
The free plan was effectively a stripped-down version of our paid product: 30-second uptime checks, status pages, all the notification channels, capped at 2 websites instead of 5. Our hypothesis was the standard one: lower the barrier to “yes” all the way to zero, let people experience the product, convert a slice of them once they outgrow the cap.
Sign-up numbers responded immediately. The week we launched it was the biggest growth week PingPing had ever had. Encouraging in isolation. Misleading in retrospect.
Why the conversions never came
Most people who signed up for the free plan only needed to monitor one site. Two, occasionally. The cap was theoretical for them. They got 100% of the value they wanted from the free tier and had no functional reason to ever pay us.
We tried to fix this by trimming features down: pushing free accounts to 5-minute checks instead of 30-second, removing the status page. That just made the free plan worse without giving anyone a clearer reason to upgrade. People who were happy on the original free tier mostly stayed happy on the worse free tier - the same ones who were never going to convert anyway.
The lesson: a free plan needs a clear “you will hit this wall and want to pay” axis. For a one-site monitor, that axis barely exists. Pricing dimensions only matter if your typical customer crosses them.
The abuse you do not see coming
Within a few weeks we noticed a single domain pattern dominating our new sign-ups. It traced back to a code-collaboration platform where users were spinning up demo subdomains and adding them to free PingPing accounts on autopilot. Some of these accounts were obviously scripted. The “websites” being monitored were “hello world” landing pages with no real reason to be monitored at all.
Free monitoring is interesting to people who are not real customers. The free plan turned us into a checkbox in someone else’s automation pipeline. We blocked the domain. They moved to bit.ly redirects pointing to the same demo URLs. We blocked the bit.ly hostnames. Eventually we blocked the upstream IP range.
This kind of abuse does not register as growth on a sign-up chart, but it costs you real money in monitoring traffic, support inbox volume, and engineering attention. If you are a small team, the support load alone can outweigh whatever upside you imagined from the volume.
The cost side that always wins
There is a version of the free-plan argument that says “the marginal cost is near zero, so why not?” That argument was wrong for us in two ways.
First, monitoring is not near-zero marginal cost. Every monitored URL is real outbound traffic from real geographic nodes every 30 seconds. Multiply that across thousands of new free accounts and the infrastructure bill is no longer hypothetical.
Second, the part of the cost stack that scales with users is not always compute. It is support questions, abuse review, false-positive triage, and the time you spend looking at conversion dashboards trying to figure out why the funnel is broken. None of that scales down because it is “just” a free user.
What replaced it: a real trial
We turned the free plan off at the end of September and reinstated a 14-day free trial. Every feature, no credit card required. The conversion math improved immediately. The thinking behind it:
- A trial gives people a clear deadline to decide. That alone collapses the “I’ll get around to upgrading” cohort.
- A trial filters out the demo-page automation case, because nothing stays running for free after 14 days.
- A trial signals seriousness. Plenty of founders prefer “pay if you keep it” over “free forever,” because they know free-forever tools tend to disappear when the company runs out of runway.
What we would tell another SaaS founder
A short list, written for someone weighing the same call:
- Map the wall. Before launching a free plan, write down the one feature or usage threshold you expect a typical happy customer to bump against. If you cannot name it precisely, the free plan will not convert.
- Assume some fraction of your free signups are not real customers. Plan how you will spot and stop abuse before you launch, not after.
- Watch your support volume per signup, not just signup totals. A growth number that comes with proportional support load is not free, it is just an invoice you have not added up yet.
- A 14-day trial is not the only alternative. Some products fit 7-day, some 30-day. Pick the length that matches how long a real evaluation takes, then stick with it long enough to read the conversion data.
We do not regret trying the free plan. We regret leaving it on as long as we did. If you are debating the same question, give yourself a fixed window to evaluate, then make the call honestly.
If you want to try PingPing on a real 14-day trial, you can start one without a credit card. It takes about a minute.