Our free tier user base grew 300%. Support costs ate 40% of our revenue

We launched our SaaS with a very generous free tier. We wanted to get as many people using the product as possible to build word-of-mouth. It worked—our free user base exploded by 300% in six months, and our brand awareness grew massively.

But I just finished our quarterly financial review, and the numbers are terrifying.

While our paid revenue grew by 15%, our support costs grew by 60%. When I dug into the data, I found that 80% of our support tickets were coming from free users. They were asking for custom features, requesting API access, and expecting 1-on-1 onboarding calls—for a product they were paying $0 for.

We are essentially running a free help desk for people who have zero intention of ever upgrading. Our small support team is burned out, our response times for paying customers are slipping, and our margins are shrinking because we have to pay for more support staff just to handle the free crowd.

I realize now that "free" attracts a completely different demographic—people who value their time less and expect more. We optimized for top-of-funnel growth but completely ignored the unit economics of support.

For founders who have faced this: How did you put the genie back in the bottle?

Do you cut off support entirely for the free tier? Do you limit them to a community forum? Or do you just sunset the free tier completely and force everyone to start with a paid trial?