For a while, your first family Coop was free. Not a trial, not a teaser. A whole Coop, built by hand, yours to keep. I meant it, and I am glad I did it, and I have just taken it away. Here is why.
The hole in it
Here is what my family pricing used to say. Your first Coop is free. A second one is a few dollars a month. Unlimited Coops is a bit more.
Read that again and you can see the problem. Nobody wants a second Coop. So I was giving away the entire product and charging for something nobody needed.
The wrong thing to measure
The mistake was the unit. I was counting Coops, when the thing people actually feel is how much is inside one. A single family Coop can hold the school year, the rides, the homework, the notes between everyone, and a photo reader that turns a snapshot of a flyer into calendar entries. That is a substantial thing, and I was handing it over and then asking for money to duplicate it.
The part that actually hurt
Free was not free for me. Every one of those Coops was built by hand, by me, and then maintained by me when a school changed a date or someone wanted another section. The cost did not go away because the price did. It just moved onto my evenings.
And I could not do the thing I am best at. Somebody would ask for one more piece, the exact piece that would have made the difference, and I would have to weigh it against the paid work. That is a bad position to be in when the whole promise is that a real person keeps building.
the honest version
A free tier that costs the founder real hours is not generous. It is a slow apology you make to yourself for not having priced the thing.
What replaced it
A Family Coop now has a price, and you can see one working before you pay it. The demo is a real Coop, seeded with a family who does not exist. Open it, change anything, break it, reset it, change it again. No card and no account.
That does the job free was supposed to do, which was to let you find out whether this helps, without me building something for nothing.
Why I am telling you this
Partly because a few people reading this have the same hole in their own pricing, and it is much easier to see in someone else's.
The test is simple. Ask what your free tier gives away, then ask whether the paid tier is more of that, or something different. If it is more of the same thing, you have built a version of what I built, and you will find out slowly, by not getting paid.