How do you decide what features should be free and what should be paid?
Let me start from the creator’s perspective:
I personally don’t have a product (apart from hiring people for creative work or offering personal consultations).
But as a creator, I constantly share content, insights, and information, value that helps me build trust (for free). Based on that perceived expertise, people eventually decide to work with me (a paid service).
So some things I share for free to eventually move toward a paid collaboration.
Personally, it’s sometimes hard to judge when I might be giving away too much for free.
And I assume it’s similarly tricky for builders.
You want users to try the product, but then comes the question of paid features, or a trial limited by time or usage.
How do you decide which parts of your product or service remain free, and which become paid?
When I share content publicly, I usually provide generalised advice. But when it comes to a specific case or a tailored strategy that requires a personal approach, that’s where it becomes paid.
Replies
The way you described your own content strategy actually nails it, give enough to build trust, hold back enough to create a reason to pay. Most builders just need to ask, would someone pay for this or are they only using it because it's free? very different users.
If I'm doing freemium, I like for the free version to be genuinely useful to my audience.
Too many people publish completely useless versions of their thing as the "free version" which I find incredibly off-putting.
As for paid features, I try to think of enhancements that not everyone will need, but that those who do need it will be willing to pay for, e.g. stuff that will help them use the product to make more money, upsell their clients, or similar.
Team/collab features are usually paid; the single-user core should stay free.
How about asking the question: "Would a free user still recommend this to a friend?"
If yes, the free tier is doing its job. If no, that means either locked too much behind the paywall or built the wrong thing entirely.
For Disciplines, I drew a clear line: anything a basic productivity app already does is free. Tasks, habits, goals. No restrictions.
But the features that make Disciplines actually different, focus sessions with real app blocking, app limits, and productivity analytics, those are paid. The logic was simple: if someone else already offers it for free, I can't charge for it. But if it's exclusive to my app and solves a problem nobody else is solving, that's where the value lives.
The tricky part was resisting the urge to lock basic features behind a paywall to force upgrades. I think that destroys trust. Let people fall in love with the system first, then show them what Pro unlocks.
Launching on Product Hunt on Monday if anyone wants to follow along 👀
I think it's to do with barriers to entry. So I want to get our product on as many servers as possible, so it has to have value in the free version, then we have paid things that are of real value to the enterprise.
Interesting discussion. To me, whether a product should be free or paid depends on how you define its value.
I usually think about it in two ways. One is to keep the basics free and charge for what is uniquely yours. That can work well, but it becomes fragile if your differentiators are easy for others to copy.
The other is to treat the whole product as the value. If what users are really paying for is the complete experience rather than any single feature, a fully paid model can make perfect sense.
A rough analogy that comes to mind is the history of macOS upgrades. At one point, people were willing to pay for the software experience itself because it was a major part of the value. Over time, that shifted, and the operating system stopped feeling like something people wanted to buy on its own. The value moved elsewhere, and Apple adjusted accordingly.
Maybe there is something useful in that framing.
IMO free should show the value, paid should unlock serious/repeated use.
For Theoria for example I keep the basic experience free: people can find research, read simple explanations, and see if it’s actually useful for them.
The paid part starts when someone wants to go deeper or use more expensive AI features again and again, like asking detailed research questions, getting deeper paper analysis, creating audio summaries, or finding practical uses from research.
So my rule right now is:
Free = help users get the “ok wow, this is useful” moment.
Paid = help them save time repeatedly once it becomes part of their workflow.
The hard part is making free useful enough to build trust, but not so complete that there’s no reason to upgrade.
I think some thing people get wrong is they monetize anything that costs them money which isn't bad but I think free tier should at least give an idea of the value a paid service could provide. This lets users try it out and see the value and eventually builds trust.
It’s pretty similar to what you said—general capability is free, but when it gets into reliability, volume, or more tailored/serious use, that’s where we draw the line.