The only unpaid tier
Don't kill your free tier — demote it. Make the earned tier your product's only unpaid tier: the free plan (or trial) folds into it as a small baseline that keeps working for everyone, and posting is the way past it.
Killing the free plan stops the compute bill and the top of your funnel in the same move. Instead, make it work for you.
Why founders reach for the kill switch
The case against the free tier writes itself now, especially for AI products: every free request carries real inference cost, anonymous signups invite multi-account abuse, and the funnel it feeds is silent — free users arrive, use the product, and tell no one. So the instinct is to delete it and run a paid trial.
What killing it actually costs
Deletion has a bill too, and it arrives later. Marketing gets harder: "try it free" is the strongest call to action a self-serve product has, and every alternative converts colder traffic worse. A time-boxed trial replaces a known population of free users with an unknown population of dropouts — people who ran out of days before they ran into value, and whom you never hear from again. And a product with no unpaid path stops being recommendable in the casual way products spread: "just try it" needs somewhere to send people.
The demotion
An earned tier keeps what the free tier was good at and prices what it was bad at. Keep a deliberately small baseline — enough that the product does its job for everyone, so no user of your product (or customer of theirs) is ever left hanging. Everything above the baseline is either earned or paid. Earning means posting publicly about the product, disclosed and verified; the operator sets what a post is worth and how often one user can earn.
The framing matters as much as the mechanics. This is not a new tier stacked on top of free — that reads as a growth hack. It is the unpaid tier, singular: the baseline lives inside it, and "post to expand your plan" is the story users hear. Nothing is taken away; a way up is added.
How small should the baseline be?
Small enough that someone with real usage feels the wall in their first week or two. That is not stinginess — it is timing. The first week is when a new user is most engaged with the product and has the freshest reason to post about it. A baseline generous enough that nobody ever hits it is the old free tier with a new name, and it buys the old free tier's silence.
This is not hypothetical for us: Earnesty runs its own earned tier, and the running programs and precedents are their own page.
Questions founders ask
Should I kill my free tier?
Demote it instead. Keep a small baseline that works for everyone, fold it into an earned tier, and let posting be the way past it. You keep the acquisition funnel and the safety floor; you stop giving the expansion away for silence.
Is an earned tier just freemium with extra steps?
No — the step is the product of the tier. Freemium spends on access and receives silence; an earned tier spends the same and receives a disclosed public post per grant. The friction of posting is also what filters anonymous multi-account signups.
What happens to my existing free users?
Nothing is taken away. The baseline keeps working exactly as before; what changes is that there is now a way to expand beyond it without paying. The story to existing users is an addition: post about the product, earn more.