Last October, I saw a friend's tweet expressing frustration about MyFitnessPal making its barcode-scanning feature a paid feature:
He wasn’t alone! As someone who hasn’t used MyFitnessPal for a while, I’m sort of like “meh, whatever”, but I get it. If you’re used to a product being free and all of the sudden they want to charge for your favorite feature, you’ll feel betrayed.
It’s also a little absurd? “What?! You want me to pay for a thing I get an incredible amount of value from even though I’ve never paid a cent for it? And how!” The fact that so many people were upset is pretty clear validation that the feature is valuable enough to put behind a paywall. And yet, people are upset.
Who knows if this worked out well for MyFitnessPal and their private equity owners, Francisco Partners. I’m sure it resulted in some additional revenue. But I’m sure it also triggered a break in the loyalty loop as users started looking for alternatives. Maybe that was okay? It ultimately depends on their goals.
This brings up an interesting question: when you offer a service for free, what should your messaging look like?
Free forever
Early on when I was Trello, the most common feature request that came into our support inbox was, “How much does Trello cost?” You might push back and say, “Hey, that’s not a feature!”Indeed, it’s a question and not really worded as a feature request, but how often are requests from customers worded the way we want and expect? Anyway, the underlying pain point of this question was that Trello’s users were worried that without a sustainable business model, Trello would go the way of Google Wave. No one wants to invest hours and hours learning a new tool only to have it go away.
One way we addressed this concern was by adding a help article about how Trello made money, to alleviate fears that Trello might vanish one day. I can’t remember what the earliest version of that article looked like, but the Internet Archive has a version from February 2014:
I remember workshopping that copy internally. We were committed to making Trello free—“forever”, we said—and we didn't want users to worry about a bait and switch later on, where the features they'd come to depend on suddenly had a price tag. We were willing to make some pretty bold brand promises to earn their trust.
Did it work?
In the short and medium term, absolutely. Trello’s business model was, loosely, “Get to a hundred million users and figure out how to get one percent of those users to pay us a hundred dollars per year.” In that model, Trello was committed to supporting its free users and delivering to them a remarkable experience so they would generate the network effect necessary to get to a hundred million users. The “free user experience” had to be the number one priority because user growth was the number one priority. Even as Trello rolled out paid features, the product team was careful not to mess with the core experience for free users too much.
In the long term, it’s harder to say. I left Trello in 2016, a few months before Trello was acquired by Atlassian. User growth had been the goal and the driving force behind many product decisions, including making bold brand promises about Trello being free (“forever”). Arguably, Trello was doing a good job being free so it could achieve exactly what happened with the Atlassian acquisition.
I wasn’t there after the acquisition, and I have no inside knowledge, but I suspect that goals may have started to change in the ensuing years. In 2019, they made a big change that limited the number of boards a team could have. Did the promise of “everything that’s free today will be free tomorrow and forever” still hold up? Eh, I guess you can make as many teams as you want, but spirit of making free users the primary focus definitely had changed, and that’s quite reasonable. At some point Trello needed to make the shift from free users being its primary customer to paid users being its primary customer, and that’s okay.
I suspect MyFitnessPal went through something similar. As a VC-backed business, their primary goal would have been growth, growth, growth, so making bold commitments with the free version of the product would have made a ton of sense. But two acquisitions later, I wouldn’t be surprised if their goals had changed. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if many of the users who they acquired in the growth years aren’t keen to stick around for the make-revenue-go-up years.
“Free” commitments
How much should you care today about the commitments you make to free users? If you’re an early-stage startup, you certainly can’t predict every possible permutation of your future business, but you can say honest things today that will hold up under a variety of scenarios. That’s what we were trying to do in the early days of Trello, even if we didn’t get it 100% correct.
Avoid words like “forever” and “never”. It’s clunky to say “this feature is free until we have a massive exit and then we’ll try to do right by you, the user, but honestly we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” But you can come up with copy that is both honest and in the spirit of what you’re trying to communicate. If you’re not sure what to say, ask ChatGPT for inspiration.
A big reason why you want to avoid words like “forever” and “never”—even in the early days—is because those words can become gospel not only for customers, but also for the team building the product. “But you said this feature would always be free!” is probably a phrase that has been thrown around at many a product meeting. Clarifying what you intend to be free and how that might change in the future can be incredibly helpful to the team building the product. When—not if—the goals of your business ultimately change, it will be easier to bring them along because the path has already been paved. And when it’s easier for your team, it will be easier for customers.