Mason Brooks

For the first year of our SaaS, we offered a very robust free tier. One of the most loved features was our "Advanced Export" tool, which let users download their data in custom formats. It was expensive for us to maintain, but it drove a lot of signups and goodwill.

Last month, we decided it was time to monetize. We moved the Advanced Export feature behind our $19/month Pro plan, assuming it would drive a wave of upgrades from our 4,000 free users.

Instead, it sparked a revolt:

• Within 48 hours, 1,200 users deleted their accounts entirely.

• Our community forum was flooded with angry posts calling us "greedy" and "bait-and-switch."

• We only got 45 upgrades, which didn't even come close to offsetting the lost traffic and reputation damage.

When we launched our SaaS, we wanted a pricing model that was simple and appealing. We offered a $99/month "Unlimited" plan that allowed users to process as many files and API requests as they wanted. We thought it would attract power users and scale well.

For the first few months, it worked fine. Most users stayed well within reasonable limits. But then we noticed our AWS bill spiking.

I dug into the usage analytics and found one single account on the $99 plan that was processing over 50,000 API requests a day. They had essentially integrated our tool into their own high-traffic product and were using us as their backend infrastructure. Our cloud costs to support this one user were averaging $1,200 a month. We were literally paying $1,100 a month for the privilege of having them as a customer.

When I reached out to them to discuss upgrading to a usage-based tier, they were furious. "The plan says unlimited! I bought unlimited!" They refused to upgrade, and we had to make a tough decision: either eat the loss, or break our promise and throttle them.