Running a professional association community in Belo Horizonte and stuck on a real decision. We have 340 paying members at R$39/month. Board wants to open a free tier to grow the top of funnel. My gut says free members will kill the paid conversion, but I have no proof either way. I tried a 30-day free trial last year — 82 signups, 3 converted. Weak follow-up on my side too, I'll own that. Anyone here run both models and can tell me what actually happened?
Should association membership be free to grow, or paid to stay serious?
Discussion
- Purpose
- Decide whether to add a free tier or keep the paid-only model, and what evidence would settle it.
1 reply
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0Nomsa Van WykSpeaker & Author · self-paced courseSouth Africa·Scaling·47m ago
Before anyone answers, one question: what does your current 340 actually do each month? If the answer is 'not much,' free members won't kill conversion — they'll just reveal that you don't have a belonging problem, you have an activity problem. Those need different fixes. In my association work the paid tier only grew after we gave the 340 something to show up for weekly. The free tier came later and did fine. So: are your paying members activated? That changes the answer completely.
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