Gregg Blanchard September 23, 2021
Yesterday I talked about why we don't offer a free tier for SendView. Or, rather, why we don't offer one anymore.
But that's not exactly true.
Because while we don't let people create 100% free accounts in SendView, we do create tools that give people access to some of those features and let people use those for free.
Expectations
An interesting thing happens when you have a free tool instead of a free tier. A free tier is an account. It's just like a paid account in every way except the price. And, thus, it comes with a certain expectation of support and requires the same resources to maintain from an IT perspective as a paid account.
But a free tool? Well, that's different.
The expectation of support all but disappears. And because it's its own thing, we can design it to use resources that are more aligned with the value it creates for both us and the people who use it.
Free tools are are also:
- Easier to do SEO for because they're not password protected
- Easier to get ongoing marketing value from because they're more easily launchable/shareable
- Easier to shutdown if they don't deliver value
- Easier to update because there's no risk from some $____/mo group of paying customers
They let us pull some of the value out of SendView to share with the world - and get a lot of value in return - without having to bear the burden of support or adding complexity to our product.
Examples
For us, that means tools like:
- ESP Finder (showcases our ESP identification capabilities)
- Trump vs Biden (showcases the ability to compare strategies)
- TweetDeets (showcases the design/use of our dashboards)
And, honestly, building these tools is fun. They're a nice way to do some more exciting dev work in and around the sometimes more tedious updates and maintenance of a growing app like ours.