Calendly's leadership explains why they keep their free plan generous instead of restricting it to push upgrades. They're also building AI features that will suggest meetings and support scheduling agents, launching by year-end.
So we, we love our free users and we're happy for our users to be free.
I have a question on so what are your thoughts on Calendly's current paying ratio? What are the feature strategy or just kind of, you know, keep them in the overall user base even though they're not paying and then they just surfacts free users.
What is our strategy for converting free users or retaining free users?
And I like the second half which I think you asked which is how, how do you think about your free frees? Like how valuable are your free frees to you today at scale?
So we, we love our free users and we're happy for our users to be free. Like the way we view it is like the, the, the first level of value is you use our product in any capacity. We don't care if you use it for free or you pay. And then the next level of value is you use it and you pay for it. Because in our world even free users have an LTV associated with them. Because the number one we spend almost zero dollars on well we have headcount in marketing but we have almost zero dollars in marketing campaigns. So it's all being driven by the activity of our, of our, of the users on the platform. We're happy to, we're happy for people to use the product for free.
Are there sometimes. Are there have been. When I mean I know every quarter has been perfect at Calendly since inception.
Perfect.
But at moments when there's been stress have folks revenue team, product team or others wanted to tighten that, wanted to like take some away from free?
I think the you know, if you talk to a sales rep accountably their number one competition is not you know, any of the you know, competitors that they mentioned. It's the free, it's the, and the recommendation they all make is like you know, like limit the, you know the features that you give on the free plan. And we've resisted that. Besides then I don't think we've ever taken anything away from the free plan. We've only made the free plan more generous.
Whenever I'm like in a, seeing a board meeting or management team I'm okay if like the sales team wants to tighten it but when it becomes a vibe at the company I just get worried.
It's very short sighted. Like our approach generally is to add more value to the, to the paid plans as opposed to reduce value, reduce remove value from the free plan.
My question is about AI application with Calendarly. So what's your plan like towards how calendarly integrated more AI to, you know, boost the productivity in the process.
So, you know, I think just like every productivity or just really like any software application, AI is going to, is both an opportunity and a threat. And the, you know, I mentioned one example earlier of how we are, you know, preparing for a world in which more scheduling is done by AI agents. We want to be able to support that. That's in the works. What we're not good at today, what we don't really do much of is like helping you think about you should be meeting with that you haven't already told us to meet with. So we're working on that. I think towards the end of the year you'll see us, you know, make some initial, do some initial releases around that.
I'm super passionate about the AI getting you to take, helping you take the next steps that you otherwise forget to do.
Right.
And selfishly, I'm also looking forward to it because I, you know, I forget a lot of things these days.
