True but as a solo or small team, freemium is not sustainable. Instead, double down on trying to get those previous Free users to actually pay for the service by providig something much better which solves real pain for them.

Even at 100% conversion, we wouldn't have made enough money to make the service actually WORTH pursuing long term, but that wasn't the goal.

NavHere's losses were a budgetary rounding error across my larger organization, and it did provide us customers that actually USED the system.

It was never meant to be a profit center or a loss leader, but I had hoped from the start it would cover the cost to run it.

It lost a total of around $1200/year, and that money would have just gone toward some other random business expense anyway that wouldn't have captured customers.

All in all I'd say it was a worthy loss, just not one I want to continue maintaining.

Take it as a business lesson/course which you learned practically. Now you know what NOT To do next time :).