Freemium is a pricing model that gives users an ongoing free tier. A free trial is a time-limited evaluation that provides fuller access before the user decides whether to pay.
A few days ago, we silently changed Process Street’s pricing model for all new users from freemium to a 30-day free trial. At the same time, we increased the price of all plans except the entry-level 10-user plan, then called Premium 10. Today, we announced that we were ending the free plan and switching existing free users to a 30-day trial of Premium 10.
During the trial, users had complete access to test Process Street. They could create as many templates, teams, and jobs as they wanted and try any plan without charge. At the end of 30 days, they had to decide whether to continue as paid users.
Paying customers on plans larger than 10 users could remain on their existing plans without changes. Moving to a different plan would place them on the new pricing model.
This post explains why we chose to move from freemium to a free trial.
| Model | Access window | Evaluation strength | Main tradeoff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freemium | Ongoing free tier | Low-friction product discovery | Limits can prevent realistic team testing |
| Free trial | Fuller access for a fixed period | More complete product evaluation | Users must decide within the trial window |
Why Freemium in the First Place?
There were a couple of reasons we launched Process Street on a freemium model. First, the initial product was not ready for paying users. When Process Street first launched, it was extremely basic. We did not believe we could attract enough paying users while so many critical features were missing. We did not even have billing in place, so we could not have charged them if we wanted to.
We still needed enough users to talk to, learn from, and gather feedback from so we could improve the product. We believed freemium would help us do that.
We were also users of freemium products that gave us a great deal of value, including Evernote, Dropbox, and Asana. Their success blinded us a little, and we followed suit.
Freemium can be a strong business model when a product has consumer appeal. We expected the free tier to lower customer acquisition costs, and that expectation, combined with our need for early users, convinced us to take the plunge.
What Were the Freemium Results?
At the time of this announcement, our conversion rate from freemium to paid was 0.72%, less than 1%. The range we were comparing ourselves against in 2014 was 1% to 5%, with 2% to 3% considered a strong result for a freemium product.
I felt that our average was skewed. Since launching our MVP on November 14, we had developed the product significantly. The initial release was bare bones and did not even include a password-reset flow. The 0.72% figure averaged every signup from launch, including people who had experienced that earliest version.
We listened to hundreds of customer ideas and problems and built the strongest lessons into the product. In the 30 days before this announcement, our freemium-to-paid conversion rate had improved to 1.8%. That was a much better result, but still below the level we wanted. The experiment made the difference between early-product learning and durable paid conversion impossible to ignore.
Why Drop the Free Plan?
We changed the business model for three reasons. First, the free plan limited how thoroughly users could test the product. Process Street was built for teams because process documentation is usually created for training, consistency, or scaling an organization, not only for one person working alone.
The same applied to the number of processes. Most teams had more than five processes, which was the limit on the free plan. We heard from users who had larger teams and needed more process documents to evaluate the product realistically. The tradeoffs behind free process management software become clearer when the evaluation limit prevents a team from testing its real work.
Second, the product had evolved significantly since the initial release. We were offering much more value, so we felt comfortable charging even lower-volume users.
Finally, the change was a test of whether a different access model could increase revenue. I am not going to lie: we run a business. We had spent more than a year and a lot of money building the product, and we were not trying to give it away forever. We were not against giving things away for free, but increasing revenue was a priority, and we believed this was one of the highest-potential tests available to us.
Why 30 Days and Not 14?
We chose a 30-day trial based on data we had collected since launch. Many users needed time to get deep enough into the app to activate properly because the product required a meaningful setup investment before it could be used effectively.
At the time, Process Street was a documentation tool designed to help busy managers run their teams efficiently. That created a catch-22. Busy managers knew they should document detailed processes, but firefighting and revenue-generating work often took priority.
That pattern led to slow conversions on the freemium product. Some people converted six months after signup because they had not found time to finish their documentation. We decided to give users more time to understand the product and apply it to real work.
The assumption could have been wrong. A 14-day trial might have encouraged people to make a decision before they had tested the product fully. It was something we planned to test, but for this pricing change, we chose 30 days.
Why the Price Increase?
We increased the price of larger plans for the second and third reasons above, plus two others.
First, customers told us our pricing was low. Some people looked at the product and asked, “How is that different from Asana?” People managing large teams who struggled to keep everyone on the same page understood how valuable a solution to that problem could be.
Our example at the time was a 40-person team. Improving that team’s productivity by 10% was worth much more than the $100 per month we had charged under the previous pricing. Even at $1,500 per person each month, a 10% gain would equal $6,000 in monthly productivity. Higher salaries made the gap larger. Several customers told us they would happily pay more for returns like those.
Second, larger teams used more resources and required longer onboarding plus more intensive support. Charging more gave us room to serve those customers better.
We knew the change was significant for free users, and we were sorry if it caused problems. Everyone who had used the free plan helped us learn, and I sincerely hoped they would stay with us.
Process Street is a single Compliance Operations Platform with Docs and Ops capability areas plus built-in AI. For the current offer, see plans and trial details, or read the Process Street blog.