Four days ago, I emailed 64 potential customers to try my new SaaS, a platform for building classifieds sites. Two signed up. Nobody's paid.

I'm testing whether giving a product away for free can do what a paid trial couldn't.

These were people who'd used a classifieds product before and lapsed. I'd already offered them a paid trial. Nobody was interested. Asking someone to re-enter a category they'd left, behind a paywall, was too much friction.

So I'm trying a different approach. Every free site on my platform shows our logo and lives on our subdomain. When users share their site, they're showing our brand to everyone they reach. The bet is that growth compounds without marketing spend.

Four days in, 2 of 64 have signed up. I don't know if this works. But here's why I'm betting on it anyway, and what I've learned from the companies that already made it work.

The same people, two different offers

The previous platform charged $69/month with a 14-day free trial. Then you paid, or you left. It ran on a 12-year-old codebase that barely got updated.

People left. A lot of them. I have a list of 888 churned customers.

When I built the new version, I went back to the most recent 64, the ones whose last login was within three months. I offered them a 30-day free trial, then a paid plan. Zero signups. Barely any clicks through to the site.

Then I changed exactly one thing. Same people, same category. No trial, no credit card, no time limit. Free forever, with paid upgrades only to remove branding and use a custom domain.

Two signups. Clicks in analytics after every batch.

Four days of data. The only variable that changed was the business model. The paid price dropped too ($69 to $29 for upgrades), but the people who signed up for free never saw it. They took the offer at $0, no card, no mention of upgrading. Free was the unlock, not the cheaper paid tier.

One of the two who signed up replied with this:

Makes a lot more sense for a classifieds site. It slashes my old $60/mo overhead right off the bat.

He remembered the old price as $60. It was $69. Either way, he's telling me price was part of why he left.

What Tally actually did

Tally is a form builder. They give almost everything away for free: no trial, no credit card, no time limit. The only things behind a paywall are removing Tally's branding and using a custom domain.

As of April 2026, they're at $5M ARR. They started at $0 in September 2020.

The detail that mattered to me: they started from zero audience too. No founder-celebrity launch. They used branding as the engine from day one. Every free form shared became a tiny ad for Tally.

They didn't succeed despite giving the product away. They succeeded because the free product was their acquisition channel. (More on this in Julian Shapiro's guide to product-led acquisition.)

The mechanism: how free plus branding compounds

Here's the loop I'm betting on.

Someone builds a classifieds site on my platform, for a local community, a hobby group, a niche marketplace. To get buyers and sellers, they have to share it. That's not optional; a marketplace with no visitors is dead.

Every visitor sees two things: our subdomain and a footer that says what platform runs the site. Some get curious and look into it. A few of those sign up to build their own site, which carries the same branding into a new community. The loop repeats.

Not viral in the explosion sense. Compounding in the slow-accumulation sense. Every free signup buys a little more visibility. Over time, those add up.

Tally's loop is faster than mine. A form gets shared outward to many respondents, so every submission is an impression. A classifieds site is visited inward by a small community, so the impressions per site are lower. I'm not pretending the shapes are identical. But the cost per impression is still zero, and even low-traffic sites expose some eyes to the brand. The question is whether enough of those eyes compound over time. I don't know yet.

The paid upgrade is $29/month to remove branding and use a custom domain. That's the only thing behind a paywall. I have zero paid conversions so far. If I assume a conservative 1% conversion rate, a couple of hundred free users would cover my hosting costs. The upgrade trigger is natural: once a site gets serious enough to want its own domain, the branding comes off.

Why I rejected the Fizzy model

I didn't start here. My first instinct was that I needed paid customers fast, but also needed to let people try the product. So I looked at Basecamp's Fizzy, a Trello alternative (now a free product): 1,000 free cards, then $20/month for unlimited.

Two problems killed this for me.

Classifieds sites take time to find traction. A new site doesn't have buyers or sellers on day one. It takes weeks or months for a community to form. A time-limited trial ends right when the site is still finding its audience, so you're asking people to pay for a product whose value they haven't experienced yet.

Usage limits without branding give you no visibility. If I give free users a clean domain and no branding, there's no way for anyone to discover my product through them. A usage cap just becomes a wall. Users hit the limit and either pay or leave. Either way, nobody new finds the product.

That's when Tally's approach clicked. Branding solves the visibility problem. Free-forever solves the time-pressure problem. Together, they let the product market itself without me needing an audience.

And the downside is near-zero. It costs me about $5/month for a VPS plus dynamic S3 storage. The upside is organic growth I can't otherwise afford.

What I don't know yet

It's early. 2 of 64 is a 3% take rate on a free offer to people who'd used the category before. That could mean the price was the problem all along, and free is the fix. It could also mean only a tiny fraction of lapsed users care enough to try anything new, and free is just papering over that.

What matters now is whether the loop compounds. I'm watching how the two signups use the product. Do they build a site? Do they share it? Does anyone in their community see the branding and show up on my site?

I have 888 churned customers on the list. I've emailed 64. If the next batches look the same, 2 or 3 signups per 64, that's a signal. If the next batches are quieter, that's a signal too.

Classifieds sites are low-traffic by nature; even the successful ones serve small communities. Maybe the visibility-per-site is too small to ever snowball.

But it costs me almost nothing and some patience to find out. And in the meantime, I'm building something people can actually use, for free, which feels better than gating it behind a paywall nobody was walking through anyway.