Freemium days are counted

We have blogged about this before, before, before, and even before. Now we made a decision: Our freemium DEVELOPMENT app hosting plan will go away. We are going to have a free trial instead.

Some of you have noticed that our free tier plan became very limited lately. Free slots were nearly not available. That was an experiment we have been running. We were curious what will happen when there is no free plan available. It turned out that conversions (free to paid) have been better – even when we stitched the boarding bonus (another way to try out our service for free). So we believe that cutting the freemium model will help us to focus on our real product and serve our real customers better.

PHPower to the PHPeople

It's not that simple. We have discussed about that a lot here. I personally don't want fortrabbit to be just a really good PHP cloud hosting service. I want to make an impact on the PHP community with fortrabbit. I want fortrabbit to become to PHP what Heroku is/was to Ruby. For me the true value of this Platform as a Service is not about technology, it's about the great people (you) using it. Let's push modern PHP web application development together. A free PHP cloud development environment sounds like an obvious fit for this.

But…

• real development is probably still better done locally (Vagrant rocks!)
• our free plan had to be very limited (yes the freeze sucked)
• supporting the free plan took a lot of time
• we attracted a wrong crowd – just looking for any kind of free hosting

For now…

We are continuing our no-free-plans-available-now experiment to make sure this is not a short term effect and to listen to more feedback. We have updated the free App waiting line algorithms (more fair and transparent now).

Soon…

With the upcoming launch of our new dashboard (ETA Q2/2014 Q4/2014) we will introduce a new free trial method – apart from a lot of great improvements and new features of course.