1. Your first environment is production. Any other environment exists to protect production from yourself. I worked somewhere where the first environment was staging, then they built production. It was a disaster and staging eventually became production and the original production became staging.
2. If you've been giving away your product for free. Reach out to ALL your free customers before implementing pricing. There are probably edge cases / markets you haven't considered.
A good example here, was reading a reddit comment about some k8s management startup. So we decided to give them a try. The software was absolutely amazing for our bare-metal cluster! So, we went all-in. Then, we went to setup a new cluster a couple of years later to discover that it was no longer free. They never even told us we were grandfathered into an old free plan. Now, we probably would have paid them for a long time ... and told them their pricing was insane, a per-seat pricing would have been better.
Our cluster has hundreds and hundreds of cores for less than $500 per month. They want to charge per-core, and would cost >$2k. They were aiming for the "cloud market" where if you're paying them, you're paying them a small percentage of what the cloud costs. This is sensible, but unrealistic for our kinds of deployment, where simply launching a new server would increase our costs by hundreds of dollars instead of $50.
We reached out to them to make a deal, and they were unwilling to make a deal and treated us as though they did us a favor by grandfathering us in to a free plan all these years. Maybe they did us a favor, but they never communicated that so now we're dealing with sticker-shock and trying to figure out a way to move forward.
Needless to say, we left them with a bad taste in our mouth, and found a better tool. So, yeah, communicate to your free customers that pricing is coming but they'll be grandfathered in; and they can support you by upgrading to a paid plan.
That would have (A), triggered us to evaluate whether the tool is worth it from the get-go, (B), probably would have resulted in us purchasing a license, and (C), we would have been able to tell them much earlier in their journey that they're missing out on an entire market-segment with their pricing.
1. Your first environment is production. Any other environment exists to protect production from yourself. I worked somewhere where the first environment was staging, then they built production. It was a disaster and staging eventually became production and the original production became staging.
2. If you've been giving away your product for free. Reach out to ALL your free customers before implementing pricing. There are probably edge cases / markets you haven't considered.
A good example here, was reading a reddit comment about some k8s management startup. So we decided to give them a try. The software was absolutely amazing for our bare-metal cluster! So, we went all-in. Then, we went to setup a new cluster a couple of years later to discover that it was no longer free. They never even told us we were grandfathered into an old free plan. Now, we probably would have paid them for a long time ... and told them their pricing was insane, a per-seat pricing would have been better.
Our cluster has hundreds and hundreds of cores for less than $500 per month. They want to charge per-core, and would cost >$2k. They were aiming for the "cloud market" where if you're paying them, you're paying them a small percentage of what the cloud costs. This is sensible, but unrealistic for our kinds of deployment, where simply launching a new server would increase our costs by hundreds of dollars instead of $50.
We reached out to them to make a deal, and they were unwilling to make a deal and treated us as though they did us a favor by grandfathering us in to a free plan all these years. Maybe they did us a favor, but they never communicated that so now we're dealing with sticker-shock and trying to figure out a way to move forward.
Needless to say, we left them with a bad taste in our mouth, and found a better tool. So, yeah, communicate to your free customers that pricing is coming but they'll be grandfathered in; and they can support you by upgrading to a paid plan.
That would have (A), triggered us to evaluate whether the tool is worth it from the get-go, (B), probably would have resulted in us purchasing a license, and (C), we would have been able to tell them much earlier in their journey that they're missing out on an entire market-segment with their pricing.