When it comes to freemium, what are the pros/cons of doing a limited-time (but fully-featured) free trial, versus a feature-limited (but not time-limited) free tier?
Should be noted, a limited version should still provide some value, i.e. a version of the app that doesn't save documents doesn't count because its usage in time is artificially limited by the functionality.
People seem to tend to stick and extract maximum possible value from indefinitely free plans, put up with and work around the limitations. It's a strange phenomenon but the way people evaluate $0 vs. non-$0 products seems irrational. Possibly because we can't seem to accurately estimate the time we waste on working around limitations on a free product vs. the money we would have paid for a fully functional product, i.e. estimate the time wasted in terms of money lost.
- If you are offering a free trial, you want all your users to be customers
- If you are offering a free tier you bet your free users will either: become customers at some point or create some free marketing for you
I don't know if there are pro/cons, there are just times when you need one, and times when you need another. If you sell something really expensive, you can't put a free tier for example. It is always difficult to quantify the marketing aspect of things.