Why $9/mo is better than freemium

We're extremely excited to introduce a new Starter Plan for our customers at Userlist. Starting today, SaaS founders can enjoy the full set of features for $9/month from day one, until they hit that milestone of the first 100 customers.

In this article you'll learn how we arrived at this decision, why it's not freemium, and why we're so thrilled about it all.

TL;DR

Here's what we hope to achieve with this new plan.

• Help fellow bootstrapped founders, especially during these turbulent times. That's why we are in business. Current crisis will likely lead to many new online businesses who are tight on budget.
• Make Userlist a no-brainer for any new SaaS company.
• Reduce setup friction, as the integration will happen in the very early stage.
• Address this early period before our customer's products launch, when it doesn't make sense to pay the full price just yet.
• Help our customers grow, as we enable all features and channels (both email and in-app messages) from day one.
• If you grow, we grow.

Why not a free plan?

When the crisis came along, we started actively discussing a free plan for the first 100 users. After all, expansion revenue has been huge for our growth. After a bit of thinking, this idea evolved into a $9/mo plan.

Here's why $9 is better than free (and not because of the money itself):

• The biggest one: eliminate potential misuse (particularly spam) — $9/month is very low, but not free.
• Keep the upgrades smooth. With a free plan, collecting card information for the upgrade can get painful.
• Keep our billing system and onboarding flow as-is, without having to refactor it.

Charge more?

It's easy to say "charge more" from our standpoint, when we generate enough revenue to afford nicer tools. But one of the reasons we started Userlist was to provide an affordable tool for small companies.

I vividly remember myself in 2017, launching my first SaaS product, Tiny Reminder, as a solo non-technical founder. I had no revenue yet, but desperately wanted to send onboarding in-app messages to my users. The only tool available for that was Intercom, starting at $99/month. I paid that, but it didn't make me happy at all.

So we wanted to build a quality tool that could make the bootstrapping journey more enjoyable than that.

Limit features?

Should we differentiate the plans of features, in addition to the user count? Shall we enable both email and in-app messaging for everyone?

We decided to adopt a growth mindset — make all features available from day one, across all plans. One of the current troubles is the setup friction, so it's much better if our customers set up all channels early on.

This is exactly what Stripe does — they don't lock people out of features. Instead, they use all resources to help new businesses: Stripe Atlas, Indie Hackers, etc. 😉

Unlocking all features also feels amazing because it's a way to help founders. That's why we exist in first place.

It's a big step for our team. We hope that you'll love this new $9 plan. Onwards!