Lock in and information loss is something important to consider with any SaaS solution, especially if you're going to use the free tier. Migration with data and history is often very difficult or impossible. If you think a SaaS platform would be worth paying for in the future across the different pricing tiers, then go for the free or lowest tier and move up as your needs increase. If not, there's always email and local spreadsheets to take care of whatever you'd need, though it would be cumbersome. But you'd at least have the data with you in formats that everyone can understand and improve.
(Tbh, if you're talking about Google Docs, it's not even that cumbersome. Still, I prefer Office 365 and would probably plump to spend my own cash on that. This is not the point of what I was going to post though.)
I think what you say is totally valid but an additional observation is that once a SaaS gains some traction, or perhaps because they need the cashflow, sometimes the free tier can disappear or be significantly reduced.
The canonical example here for me is UserVoice: it used to have a free tier, no longer does and, in fact, whilst I was writing this post I was searching for current pricing... but it turns out they're not even transparently priced any more (please feel free to correct me if I missed something).
Yeah UserVoice starts at ~$15k/yr nowadays, and it'll take you ~3 calls with their sales team to even get a price. Canny is a modern alternative with upfront pricing, and is actually the company behind this thread's blog post!
I'd used it on small projects, and I know Microsoft still use it (or at least were as of a few months back) for Teams amongst other products. I remember wanting to use it for a side-project a few years back and being disappointed that the free tier had gone, but thinking it would still probably be worth it for something with commercial value.
But... $15k/annum. I mean, I hope it's working out for them but that's pricing out a huge chunk of the market. Maybe they've just done their segmentation really well and are coining it.
How suitable is it for a support email inbox? I've used intercom in the past but their pricing is annoying and their entire tooling is … problematic. I could get into it but point is they don't fit the bill for mid-to-large b2c businesses with free support inboxes.
One of our primary goals is to create a AAA email client that behaves like you expect an email client to. A second goal is to inject collaboration in the email experience. Those two goals make Missive a perfect candidate for email support.
You're not really answering the question here, you're just stating fairly vague goals. I guess I should be more specific: Do you have a good featureset for support inboxes (such as Assignees, internal notes, open/closed requests, ticket merging, product teams with auto categorization for different email/Twitter accounts, ...) or would using Missive for support inboxes be more of a hack?
FWIW, at Canny, we're a giant fan of Missive—the collaboration aspect to it is amazing and very useful! Plus, it looks and acts nice and simple with no overly complicated bells and whistles. Love!
If I could suggest my company's own tool as an addition to this list, https://ReferDigital.com is an affiliate marketing platform without any signup/monthly fees, and no volume tiers at which this phases out. (It earns money as a fraction of any commission earned only - no sales driven by affiliates, no fees due).
Always think of tools in terms of your company's long term goals.
A free tool that doesn't offer possibilities to scale or won't remain cost-effective at scale or doesn't offer features to migrate to other tools can easily cost more than going with something that looks expensive or less appealing right now.
Also, evaluate tools in terms of their familiarity to developers, sales and customers in your domain.
You're absolutely right. We're not saying that companies starting out should just go for the free plan no matter what and not think about it at all. That's why we added the entry level pricing as a side note, as well as a link to the pricing page and reviews for further investigation. The added calculation sheet also helps to see potential costs based on any plan, not just the free ones, to see how it would affect the total money spent. We also very much held back on including free, yet very low quality/limited tools. And yes—awesome point about the familiarity aspect!
I see way too many market leaders on the list - just because they have a free plan doesn't mean they are good "for companies on a budget". The free tiers are designed to hook you in, but switching once you hit the limits can be very expensive (resource wise) and shouldn't be part of cost-saving strategy.
Take MailChimp for example - it's a very expensive email marketing solution.
BigMailer.io is a great alternative to EmailOctopus because it supports transactional emails (EmailOctopus doesn't) in addition to bulk and auto/drip, and it offers a more generous free tier - up to 5,000 contacts.
The free tiers are great but trying to run a business with those limits can be difficult then you get locked in to the expensive platform just as you start to gain traction and have to payup or reinvest in the stack.
Thanks for the comment! That's 100% true—that's why we added the entry level pricing as well as the link to the pricing page for further evaluation. As a bootstrapped company, at Canny, we're a big fan of (high-quality) free options at least to start out with, when you really just need the basics. We have had to upgrade/change a few times when the free tier doesn't cut it anymore as we grow, but they did for enough time to save us some money when it was extremely important to.
Interesting/odd that Canny does NOT have a free tier. I was about to say "where were you 3 weeks ago when I really needed a feedback tool with a free tier" but then I saw all their plans are paid...
I don't think self-hosted versions of many of these tools exist. Are you suggesting you build them yourself? It'd take years and your time is worth far more than the money you'd save.
You’d be surprised how wrong you are. Most startups base their value proposition on the fact that by buying saas instead of software, you don’t have to pay a guy for infrastructure, maintenance and system administration.
Which makes totally sense for large organisations but less sense for small ones where it could be easy to manage most services off a single box, provided that regular backups are made.
Consider git alone: you can run a small gitlab instance for free. You can do ci/cd off a jenkins instance. Ticketing systems are one of the oldest things around.
Some basics of system administration is all you need.
