Why we added a Free Plan for our SaaS

Early on we had decided that our SaaS Loqbooq should not have a free plan. After all, it is a service aimed at businesses not individuals.

We thought business customers are willing to pay for a service that saves them time and reduces friction. Now, two months have passed since we publicly releasing Loqbooq. And we found that assumption does hold true.

Still, this week, we introduced a free plan for small teams, including all features. What made us change our minds? Here is what we learned from our early adopters.

Our business model

Loqbooq is an app to record your project decisions and commit to these decisions as a team. We have a web app and a Slack app.

We are convinced that Loqbooq is a service that saves companies money. When you document your project decisions, your teams spend less time researching why things were done as they were done.
New team members can be on-boarded quicker as you have a record of all decisions on design, architecture or strategy, as well as the reasoning behind them.
And if your project involves multiple parties, it also reduces stress and discussions if stakeholders commit to decisions together.

Our customers consider Loqbooq a valuable tool that is worth paying for it.
And of course, we rely on paying customers as our business model. We do not sell our users data nor do we display advertisements and never will.

But then why add a Free Plan?

For us, offering a free plan is about organically convincing teams that Loqbooq is a useful and easy to integrate tool.

When we talked to our early adopters we learned that introducing new tools in a team can be a slow and complicated process. We often hear things like:

I really love Loqbooq. But I also need to convince my team.

We learned that it is often one or two individuals who see the need for a decision log in a project. The easy part for them is to find a tool for that (like Loqbooq). But the hard part is to convince their team to make the step to actually use a decision log.

We did already offer a trial period so interested teams could try out and experiment with Loqbooq before needing to enter a credit card number. Yet, this often was not sufficient.
Having created some sample decisions is just not as convincing as using Loqbooq as part of your actual daily work. And that is where we see the new Free Plan comes in.

Make it easy for early adopters

Now, a small group of early adopters within an organization can use Loqbooq with all features in their real projects for as long as they need it for free!

The only limitations are that you cannot have more than three decision logs and can only have three reviewers on each decision. This should work out fine for small teams or startups.

Now, early adopters can play with Loqbooq and experiment with decision logs in a small project. They can take their time to integrate it in their work culture, project structure and other tooling they already have.

But most important: They dont need to ask for budget to do a pilot project.

Spread to larger teams

Once a group of early adopters is convinced that Loqbooq actually suits their needs and improves their project management, they can start expanding the use to more or larger projects.

When they now pitch it to their teams, they have real world experience with the tool, making it much easier to win over more hesitant colleagues. And only then they need to upgrade to the paid Pro Plan for an unlimited number of logs and reviewers.

How it worked out

Well, we will only know in a couple of weeks or months. The downside of letting your users use your product for free up to some limits is obvious: it takes much longer for users to decide for a paid plan.