Jason M. Lemkin explains why freemium works for some companies but not others. Atlassian, HubSpot, and Mailchimp grew faster after adding free tiers, but only because they made it a core priority, not an afterthought. A free edition forces your product to be self-serve and usually makes it better.
Email similarly is not a marketing strategy. Just adding a free edition does not magically give you millions of users to convert to paid either. Tacking on some new PLG freemium low end initiative to magically boost numbers because you think it's cheaper than a sales or marketing led initiative is the wrong way to do it. The right way to do it is to say look, things are going pretty well, but we're losing the segment of the market where you invest and we're going to make freemium or PLG or a low end edition a top three corporate priority. And in fact we are seeing more and more companies add freemium editions. Atlassian adding free HubSpot adding free mailchimp, adding free as three mature examples actually allowed their business to accelerate. So I'm all for adding a freemium edition and I think it actually tends to make the product better because it has to be self serve. I'm all for adding a low end edition.
