Questions

I have a mobile app that requires paid subscription ($23.49 / year). It has free 7 day trial. The app lets parents control what kids can watch on YouTube by 'approving' channels. I have about 200 paying clients but it looks like people are looking for a free solution, here's an one-star review of my app: > Very misleading. It says free but it's only free for 7 days. Wish they would put that in the description. I've put 'this is a paid app!' in description but I wonder if I can turn it into freemium somehow. My challenge is figuring out what should be free and what should require a payment. My best thinking is to keep free 7-day trial with full functionality but after trial expires the app switches to free mode. In free mode preset educational channels only are available. If a parent wants to restore channels they added before they have to buy 1-year subscription. My concern is that parents would still say 'It's not free!' when I ask them to start a trial after they install the app. On the other hand if start from the free mode without trial they will never get a chance to experience the main promise of the app: controlling what their children can watch.

Very interesting concept - I could see how parents would certainly gravitate towards a feature like this. So, freemium apps, models, features are quite common of course and people have grown accustomed to most applications or platforms at least offering a trial period (as you do.) But, if you were my client my first question I'd ask you is: do you need to even offer a free option? Typically a freemium model is offered as a means to maximize your "front of the funnel" conversion and use tools inside the platform to get people to continue utilizing the application (and thus expand into the paid services section.) You have 200 paying customers, why use freemiums at all? you know people will purchase and use your service. Why not consider say discounting or trial period pricing? from a product development standpoint it will be much easier on your engineering team to manage one product version, not to mention that you potentially diminish your service perspective by at any point offering it for free. Unless a direct competitor is out there and they are beating you because of the freemium model they offer I would strongly consider avoiding it altogether. your product, from what you described, sounds simply enough to understand as a concept (it is not a digital cure to cancer you are explaining): plus parents know the value of curating and protecting their children from salacious/inappropiate content, so why try to get them familiar with the idea? As long as it does what you say it does and they are able to fairly easily use it I say go full price, or at the very least avoid free features and just do a discounted trial period. People often underestimate how shocking moving users from free to paid can be and how it actually can be a liability (e.g. Netflix has never offered a freemium model - Hulu has though.) That being said, it is possible that a freemium model makes sense for your app, under the right circumstances and context. but before diving in I'd advise going through a quick exercise to make sure it is the right move. If it is, there are some pretty common themes and feature trends you can follow to reduce friction (many of which require specific demographic and psychographic information about your target users etc.) Feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat further directly and talk through your options/evaluation.


Answered 6 years ago

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