Do feature-locked paywalls kill early-stage momentum?
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Hitting the paywall too early is such a common trap. When you lock core features behind a steep price right at the start, power users never get a chance to build a habit with the tool let alone prove its ROI to their team.
We used to gate our main productivity features instantly, which completely ruined upgrade rates.
Shifting to a usage-based limit instead of a hard feature wall helped a lot.
How do you decide which features to keep free versus what belongs in the pro tier?
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My split follows cost more than value. Anything that costs me money per use is metered: making a song spends credits, and the subscription is really a weekly refill of credits, not a key to features. Things that cost me almost nothing per use are not where I would put a wall, because the user only feels them after they already have a song they like. The one exception is a feature with a big fixed cost per user: cloning your own voice is a separate one time purchase, because each clone costs me real money once, whether the person makes one song with it or fifty. So my question for each feature is what one more use costs me, and the pricing follows that.