Title: I need an opinion, I am a developer and in 2019 I built a tool for developers(it falls in collaboration tool category), I set this tool for free and during 2019 we gained around 15000 users, things were going smooth until Covid-19 came and our tool exploded in popularity.<p>We get around 20000-35000 new users every month and have around 400000 (Four hundred thousand users) in total, every month around 80000-100000 users use it actively. All the traffic was from Google organic and word of mouth, i recruited 2 fellow develops as  co-founders and we spent the whole 2020 to develop the features and make it enterprise ready.<p>It is free until today and from 1st feb 2021 we want to launch a Paid version. Now we are not sure how to price our tool, we have 3 main competitors and the largest one have around 60000 users, but we marketed our service as a free tool. Now we are thinking about having 90% of the features as free and then offer a Pro&#x2F;Enterprise plan with features like (SSO and integrations) etc in the paid plan.<p>The challenge is that there are 20-30 other tools poped up in last 12 months and most of them are copying our strategy of marketing it as a free tool. Now how should we approach this, if we go very hard on pricing and locking features we fear that our users will go to those free tools and our growth momentum will fall. On the other hand we also want to have reveneue and also want to reach 1 million users. Please give ur suggestions as I am very depressed due to this situation.<p>OTHER NOTES: we are a team of 3 developers and have 2 freelance developers, we have not made any money from our tool and received an equity free grant from Govt (In EU we have this option), we were approached by few investors, 1 want 30% equity for 250K USD(we said no), and other is waiting for some paid conversion. We have spent around 50K of our own investment and 75k from the grant until now, monthly infrastructure cost is around 3000 USD
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