Freemium Marketing - Best for Solo Developers
I think freemium approach is excellent as both a business model dan marketing strategy for solo developers.
One of the best marketing strategy is content marketing, which involves producing content consistently. But not everybody has a knack for that. If that is you, consider the freemium model for your SaaS business.
With freemium model, you giveaway a premium product for free. But of course you will find other ways to generate revenue. For example, you can you have an invoicing SaaS. You let freelancers and small businesses use it for free, and produce as many invoices as they need. But you charge them for your branding removal, and maybe integration options for online payments.
With freemium, you give your users a taste of your software. And you meet them at the point when they are ready to grow beyond your basic functionality. At some point, you want your users to discover other functionalities of your software. But that is also where there is a pay gate, telling them that this specific function is for the Premium users, and how they can be one.
Freemium also gives you the opportunity to introduce your business to other prospects, through your free users. You do that by adding your brand to anything that your free users create and distribute using your software. And also, if you have a great software plus that it is free, words will get around. If you have an invoicing software, your brand is in all the invoices they send out. If you developed a website builder, every page has a link back to your homepage at the footer. And there are probably a dozen more ideas like that.
Of course, you will probably have more free users than paying ones. That's OK because supporting freemium users shouldn't really cost that much. Just a bit of space and bandwidth.
By the Pareto Rule, maybe 80% of your users are free users. But the 20% that pays can make up for all of that. Maybe no more 5% to 10% from your revenue is required to support the free users. But the 80% users will help spread the words about your business far and wide, online and offline.
Some businesses with the freemium model are like Tawk.to, Kiah.store, MailChimp, Zoom, Dropbox, Trello, GitHub, Cloudflare, and more...
If you feel like supporting free users are too costly, especially if your SaaS does a lot of computing, or does anything to do with video transcoding, storage and delivery, then you might want to rethink this strategy.
But if your SaaS are mostly storing data and workflow for your users, and you are a solo developer that has no clue how to market your business, then consider the freemium model.