Secrets Of Freemium Pricing: Make The Cheapskates Pay

The following is a guest post by Andy Singleton.  Andy is the founder and CEO of Assembla, a company that provides online workspaces for software teams, including bug tracking, repositories, and collaboration.  Remember, as with all guest posts, the opinions and views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the opinions of OnStartups.com — but sometimes they do.   – Dharmesh

[I originally presented this material at Barcamp Boston.  As the presentation went on, and tweets went out, the room got more and more packed.  So, I know that a lot of people are interested in this subject.  I wrote an outline for the presentation in five minutes just before the session, so it is surprising that this writeup has taken five months to compile, and has grown far beyond the usual size of a blog article.  Some subjects are important enough to deserve 8 pages.  Without further delay, I bring you “Make the cheap bastards pay.”]

My grandparents on one side were Scottish pennypinchers, and on the other side, Armenian rug merchants.  They would be proud that here at Assembla we spend only 3% of revenue on general, administrative, and overhead expenses.  Even fewer dollars go to pay for online services, although we depend for our commercial lives on the ones that we do buy.

Leave a Comment