Fair point. Two of my Level 100+ users have zero subscriptions - the free tier works for them. But here's the twist: I DO have paywalls (alarms, AI chat, analytics, infinite history). They just don't care about those features, or work around them. The one power user who IS paying (CV 0.86, irregular schedule) stopped using it 7 months ago but forgot to cancel. So the question becomes: are the wrong features locked? Or do power users just not need premium features?I even ran an A/B test (hard vs soft paywall):
- Started by "recommendation" from popular entrepreneur
- 3 months, 3k users
- Baseline (soft paywall, can skip): 0.8% conversion
- Hard paywall (must activate trial): 0.6% conversion
- Revenue tracking broken (Firebase showed $0 both variants)
- Killed experiment yesterday.
leephillips|4 months ago
They have a bunch of features that I don’t care about and never use (AI, their web browser, ...). I just need their core search product (because Google is useless). Instead of putting features behind a paywall, they offer search free of charge up to a certain number of searches per month (I think). It’s enough to learn if their search is good enough to pay for. I pay to continue to use their core service more frequently (and I guess it’s the same with most of their paying customers).
Your customers seem to find value in your core service but don’t want to pay for the extras. Maybe you could apply the Kagi model?
Nek_12|4 months ago
Kagi model applied to Respawn would be: free tier gets 50-100 completions/month. If you're crushing it like the Level 177 user (800/month), you pay to keep using the core.
This makes more sense than what I'm doing. I'm trying to monetize peripherals when the core is what they value.
The risk: does limiting completions kill the habit-building momentum? If someone hits their limit mid-month, breaks their streak, do they just churn instead of convert?
But worth testing. It's at least aligned with value - heavy users pay, light users stay free.