Has anyone removed their free tier and actually seen profits increase?

We've kept a free tier running as our main growth engine but it's getting expensive to maintain.

While some of our best paid users started on the free plan a huge chunk of our weekly support energy goes toward answering questions for non paying accounts.

Without clear tracking on our exact conversion rates it feels like we're spending valuable dev attention on users who have zero intention of buying.

We're considering switching to a free trial model instead.

If you dropped your free tier for a trial or paid only model how did it impact your bottom line and overall workload?