at what point did freemium start hurting your SaaS instead of helping

There seems to be a huge divide in micro-SaaS right now between:

1. Offering a generous free-forever tier to build word-of-mouth and top-of-funnel traffic.

2. Hard 7-to-14 day free trials with a strict paywall to weed out free-riders early.

I'm currently mapping out pricing for a utility-focused mobile/web app where the core daily actions cost almost nothing in compute, but predictive analytics and data exports add up.

The fear with freemium is supporting thousands of users who never convert, but the fear with hard paywalls is high bounce rates before users form a daily habit.

For founders who transitioned from freemium to paid-only (or vice versa):

• How did it impact your churn and conversion velocity?

• What specific metric or signal made you realize your free tier was either too generous or too restrictive?