We’re Moving Everyone To Unlimited Free Usage (Here’s Why)

Explaining our bullish strategy for unlimited freemium and the research that inspired this decision.

We’re removing all limits on the free version of OpinionX.

Users can now create unlimited surveys that engage unlimited participants and invite unlimited teammates to collaborate and create new surveys together in their shared workspace — all for free.

It might seem strange to give so much away when the trend recently has been to shit all over freemium models, not expand them. But a research project we ran at the end of 2023 produced some unexpected results that changed how we were thinking about not only our pricing strategy, but our entire company strategy.

This post explains the user research and market insights that led us to this conclusion.

— — —

Part 1: Measuring Value

Like many teams, we spent a lot of Q4 thinking about our 2024 strategy. We kept circling back to ask ourselves questions like, “What do customers see as the main value driver in OpinionX today?”

Our product is a survey tool for ranking people’s preferences and priorities (or so we thought 👀). There are literally hundreds of survey tools that people can choose from — as a four-person pre-seed startup, we obviously offer less “stuff” than any of the big survey companies. But, somehow, there were teams moving into their third year of paying for OpinionX and we weren’t 100% sure why they were sticking with us instead of moving to a more feature-rich alternative.

We figured that a good way to answer this would be to measure which features our paying customers perceive to be most valuable. We started by listing out all our main feature areas, which we used to create two research exercises:

The two voting methods we used to measure “perceived value” / “feature importance”

1. Pair Voting
Each customer was shown 15 pairs of features and asked to pick the one that was most valuable to them. We then used the “win rate” from these head-to-head pairs as a way to see which features they’d be least willing to lose access to.

2. Points Ranking
After the 15 pair votes, customers were shown the full list of features together and asked to “Imagine all of the features listed below were locked away in an expensive pricing plan you don't have access to. You're given 15 credits that each unlock a feature for one month — which features would you spend your credits on?”. This points ranking exercise helped us understand how each feature contributes to customers’ overall value perception of OpinionX.

3. Segmentation Questions
At the end of the survey, we asked three quick multiple-choice questions about their industry, company size, and job department. This data would later be used to compare differences in results of each customer type and look for segments that cared a lot about specific features.

Results
Before this survey, we had always thought about OpinionX as a tool for ranking surveys, but that’s not what the results showed… In both exercises, customers ranked “segmentation analysis” as the most valuable feature — even higher than “ranking questions”. This was especially true for Product Managers and User Researchers who chose segmentation as the more valuable feature in 86% of head-to-head pairs that it appeared in. That is a pretty significant result; only three features had a win rate of 60% or higher.

Results from the two ranking exercises, with a segmentation filter to only include data submitted by Product Managers / UX Researchers.

Part 2: Rethinking Our Value

The results of this value-perception research highlighted a big gap in our thinking…

Most sign-ups coming to OpinionX want to create ranking surveys, so we always assumed that ranking surveys should be the main purpose of the company. But now we realized that we were neglecting what paying customers actually cared about most. We needed to reframe OpinionX as a customer segmentation tool and consider surveys as just one of many ways to collect data for segmentation analysis.

Around this time, I was listening to an episode of the Unsolicited Feedback podcast (I highly recommend!) where Brian mentioned how HubSpot had these fiery internal debates about whether they should give their CRM away for free or not. His story instantly resonated with me…

”You have to attack competitors in a way where you're doing something that they would never ever do. There was this huge debate at HubSpot internally about how we should launch our new CRM. It came down to whether we should charge for it or make it free. We ultimately decided to make it free and part of that was because that was something Salesforce was never gonna do — they were never going to make their CRM, their bread and butter, a free product.” — Brian Balfour, Founder of Reforge

We had built our pricing plan around limits from day one. It had become something we had failed to question. Limiting freemium surveys to just 50 participants was also limiting the amount of data that could be used for segmentation analysis. This suddenly felt like a very counterintuitive thing to do.

But removing this participant limit still felt like a stupid thing to do — 99% of survey tools have a freemium participant limit (for example, Typeform only allows 10 participants per month across all surveys). There’s obviously a pretty important reason for why they do this… right?

Looking at category leaders like SurveyMonkey and Typeform, we realized that they built their pricing models around participant limits because there are no downstream benefits to users generating more survey data — it basically just costs those companies more money. But, in our case, more survey data means more interesting and insightful segmentation analysis for our customers, which would only make our differentiated value stronger!

It made sense for HubSpot to give their CRM away for free because their inbound marketing suite worked best when plugged into a CRM. For SMEs, it didn’t matter that HubSpot’s CRM had less features than Salesforce because it was free (the lack of features was actually an advantage for many SMEs because it made HubSpot’s CRM easier to use). Once they had started using the CRM, HubSpot’s freemium users were perfectly placed for inside sales teams to upsell them the inbound marketing suite.

Salesforce still doesn’t give their CRMs away for free today because their CRM is their core product. There’s no downstream benefit for Salesforce to justify upending their existing pricing model, regardless of whether this strategy has been working for HubSpot for ~10 years. The value-perception study and HubSpot’s CRM story made us realize that we had the perfect combination of differentiated downstream leverage waiting to be put to good use. We were ready to start making decisions…

— — —

Part 3: Strategic Decisions

Based on these ideas, we made two significant changes to our strategy:

i. We’ve stopped thinking about ranking surveys as our core product and reframed them as an acquisition channel instead. Unlimited participants means any OpinionX survey can now reach 100x more eyeballs than before. Converting survey participants into freemium users has become a far more powerful potential growth lever for us.

“Freemium is not a monetization strategy, it’s an acquisition strategy. Free users have to be generating other users for you in some way — typically through a content or viral loop.” — Brian Balfour, Founder of Reforge

ii. Ranking surveys that measure people’s preferences/priorities are literally the perfect dataset for segmentation analysis. When freemium users run a successful ranking survey, they reach an ideal state of activation where we can very easily demonstrate the benefits of segmenting their results and nudge towards converting to a paid plan.

These two ideas helped us clarify three product priorities for 2024, some of which we’ve already started shipping in January:

1. Analysis: The Segments Tab shows you the scores for every participant segment in one heatmap-style table so you can instantly see who cares most about what. The Participants Tab shows you all respondent data in one table with a bunch of analysis features layered in on top. We’re also working on a Clusters Tab to help you see which types of participants are most similar to each other.

Illustrative example of filtering and comparing segments on OpinionX surveys

2. Enrichment: We just shipped our first enrichment feature, Email Invites, which lets you import and automatically associate participants’ email addresses against their survey profiles without having to ask for it in your survey. We’ll be expanding this to other types of data in the coming weeks, making “unique links” more useful, and building integrations with your most important sources of customer data.

Illustrative example of the Segment Matrix and Clustering Map on OpinionX

3. Surveys: We will be adding some new question types (like a rating scale, file upload, and more ranking methods) and customizations, all of which will be available on the free tier, to help users gather more interesting data to feed into our segmentation and analysis features.

— — —

Part 4: Testing Assumptions

It’s dangerously easy to make decisions based on assumptions about your customers. The “value survey” I described in this post took less than half a day to design, send to customers, and analyze — but the results have shaped months of work and clarified our long-term strategy. That right there is an outsized return.

What decisions are you making today based on assumptions about your customers’ pains, preferences, or priorities? What part of your product or service delivers the most value according to your users? Does your Q1 roadmap really address the problems at the top of their stack rank? Testing your answers to these questions doesn’t take nearly as much time as you’d imagine.

Comparative ranking is a superpower for research like this — forcing customers to compare options, consider trade-offs, and make decisions that translate to clean numerical data that’s ideally suited to inform big decisions. Segmenting that data by customer type means you can ignore noisy average results and focus instead on the exact customer segments that matter most to your business.

You don’t need to be an expert researcher or some sort of data scientist to do this. Create a free value-ranking project on OpinionX today and start putting your customer assumptions to the test.

Daniel