How I miss the "old" internet. These fan made websites used to show up in google serps ages ago. I've never ran into these personal websites in the past 3+ years, no matter how deep I search.
our brand name "Paymo" is considered by google a synonym for things like project management. we get competitors that are advertising broadly on our brand name... it's truly mind blowing.
For a short while after the term was coined it even had a Wikipedia page, but it was eventually deleted for not meeting the Notability guidelines. The current Wikipedia page for Enterprise software doesn't even have a hint of criticism of the genre. I did find this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21224209
I remember in the era of Windows XP, I had downloaded a BSOD screensaver. Unfortunately, it never worked, as the few times I tried to preview it, it kept crashing the system.
A key aspect of free is the A-Ha moment your users have while using the product. With simple products this moment can be achieved quickly (like watching Netflix for a couple of days, you see the value really fast), with complex products this moment can take quite a while. In our work management SaaS [1] it takes quite some time to see the actual value of the product, we constantly see people converting from free after a year of use :)
What I'm trying to say it, there's no magic formula - you need to understand as well as you can your user base, see how long it usually takes them to understand that you do provide value with the product and importantly check out what your competitors are offering in terms of free plans.
