No, they explain how they currently hope to make money. That's a long way from being the same thing.
Consider this: for an existing service with lots of data to back up its pricing, a price list can be treated as an effective guarantee of what the service will continue to cost into the long-term. The company knows that the pricing model is profitable - and therefore, raising prices won't be worth the massive customer outcry.
For a new company, a price list is speculative. There is no way to do accurate long-term extrapolation of profitability. If the prices turn out to be too low to sustain the business, they will have to be raised - and while there will be an outcry, the business will simply have no alternative.
And since it's really hard to migrate all your data/workflows/integrations/etc. away from the service you first decide on, you're incentivised to never join a new service - because the price instability might come back to bite you, let alone if the company itself doesn't collapse later.
Nope
> How is that different from setting a price list on their website? They hope people will pay them doesn't mean they will
Agree; I would make the same comment if someone claimed a price list meant a business was stable and worth relying on.
if it's NOT good enough as-is then why bother using it in the first place?
Take a look at ProfitWell for instance, they do the same thing: Give away their core product then make money on upsells.
Also, building the business model as they go is pretty normal for a startup.
This just means that what used to be free will end up costing money when whatever new features they think they can charge for won't get enough users to cover their costs.
This is especially true if the free plan is more than enough for most users. Which, if you're positioning yourself as a Jira alternative -- most users won't need in-depth AI planning for sprints.
It's not a great business plan...
Without that you have to rely on them surviving if you want to use their platform long term.
That being said, our entire ethos is to have a functional free forever plan, where users can manage their tasks and run their sprints, without worrying about hitting a 10 user limit, limited-time trials or task limits. We're avid supporters of open source, and we believe closed source software should have wider availability. So much of B2B software is behind paywalls, demos and short trials, hence our approach.
Open-source is great. One time purchase price is great for products that don't require maintenance. Subscription pricing is perfectly valid for online services that are not open-source.
Free? Free is the worst. I don't get any trust that the service will stay around, it can completely change along the way to "paid", and I don't get to keep anything in that case.