The Freemium Wedge
A freemium wedge that shows who is ready to buy.
The product does the selling
A free entry point that teaches the buyer why the paid product matters. The free experience should create usage signal, not just collect signups.
Timeline3–5 weeks from stack access · assumes activation events exist or your eng adds them
Plan fitFits the $3,500 plan for scoring + Slack flags · $5,000 for the full wedge with nudges + routing
Run this play if
- Your free tier has signups
- Your core action is trackable
- A paid path already exists
- Someone has hours to work flags
Skip it if
- No tracking, no engineering commitment
- No free tier live yet
- Scores without an owner are decoration
If that’s you, another play fits better. Find it in 60 seconds →
Week by week
3–5 weeks from stack access · assumes activation events exist or your eng adds them
Scope
4-8 days
Access, instrumentation audit, activation definition, canvas signed
Build
2-3 weeks
Ingest, scoring, ranked view, nudges, routing
Train
one 60-min session
Owner walkthrough: config tab, flags, runbook
Own
yours
Free tier that reports on itself, tuned by you
How to measure this play’s success
Qualified upgrade candidates
The number that decides it
Flagged-to-paid rate
On your dashboard
New signup activation rate
On your dashboard
Baseline captured before we ship · reviewed at the 30-day check-in.
EvidenceTextbook pattern: a genuinely useful free tier lets prospects self-serve into value with zero sales touch (Calendly, Loom, Slack public case studies).
What happens next
We build it, document it, and hand it over.
You leave with a free tier that reports on itself. Every signup keeps getting scored against the activation events we mapped together, the ranked view tells your team who is ready to buy this week, and the nudges keep firing from your own tools. Your owner tunes the thresholds from the config tab, and when the product changes, the event map shows exactly what to re-instrument, no guesswork and no dependency on us.