#483 – Building a Smarter Free Tier

We’ve always tried our best to support small businesses by providing most, if not our entire service, for free. That’s why we’ve always wondered where exactly that line is between a team getting value and a company gaming the system.

For a long time, our free tier had a two-team limit, which would only affect companies that had more than 2 teams, or about 20 people. But over time some larger organizations had figured out they could spread across multiple free accounts to stay under the radar. We knew it was happening, but manually tracking it down wasn’t a fight we couldn’t win without a dedicated team doing nothing but whack-a-mole.

Recently we decided to work on something smarter. Rather than looking at accounts in isolation, Matt built a system that traces the relationships between organizations — clustering together accounts that, based on shared billing and usage patterns, clearly belong to the same company. From there, the system identifies which of those clusters are getting active, ongoing value from Parabol well beyond what our free tier was designed to support.

The key thing is they’re not just cut off cold. They get 30 days of notice and a clear path to upgrade. Only if they don’t act does a hard limit kick in. Drew has been fielding the conversations that follow, and the response has largely been what you’d hope: organizations recognizing the value they’ve been getting and choosing to pay for it.

The early results have been meaningful, both for our revenue and for the free tier to keep doing what it was always meant to do.

Web Sessions took a sharp decline, but not at the same rate as New Users, suggesting we appear to be losing returning visitors more than new ones. Something to investigate. On the bright side, Weekly Meetings was up 13% showing our core engaged uses remain active.

…received confirmation our SAML & SCIM app will now be available in Okta’s marketplace.

…will be conducting maintenance on Saturday at 10am PT and Parabol will be unavailable for about an hour.

…host a Parabol Social hour for the team to spend some non-work focused time together.