Welcome back to Good Better Best.
Each week, we break down real pricing, packaging, and product moves from SaaS and AI leaders and share the ideas worth stealing.
Last week, Replit removed the free plan from its website, and added a new “Free Mode” for paying customers. This idea of Freemium shifting from an acquisition strategy to an expansion strategy is the core topic today.
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This Week in Pricing, Packaging, and Product
This week we observed 100+ changes, sharing the highlights below:
Replit removed its free Starter plan and made Core the entry tier, while quantifying "Free Mode" at up to 30 hours of chat and 60 projects [Link]
Canva slashed free AI uses from 200 to 20 [Link]
Mintlify revealed credit costs for its Agents table — and made the Writing agent unlimited [Link]
Lightfield ditched usage pricing for seat plans from $89/mo, with seat caps [Link]
Freshworks added an MCP actions add-on ($15 per 1,000) across Freshdesk plans [Link]
LiveChat killed the ChatBot.com add-on in favor of a native AI Agent from $19/user [Link]
Acuity Scheduling added an AI Booking Assistant to the Premium plan [Link]
HubSpot added an AI Agents promo carousel for Customer Agent on Service Starter [Link]
Together AI hiked Qwen3.7-Max and added DeepSeek V4.1 Flash [Link]
DeepSeek merged v4-flash and vision-exp into a cheaper Flash V4.1 [Link]
OpenRouter added a Business tier: 8% fee, 1,000-workspace limit, signed DPA [Link]
Figma dropped cross-team publishing from the Professional plan spotlight [Link]
Google Workspace deepened its promo to 50% off Business Starter and Plus for 3 months [Link]
LegalZoom hiked Virtual Mail prices up to 51% across all plans [Link]
AppFolio revealed starting prices across Core/Plus/Max ($1.49–$5.00/unit) [Link]
Mobbin expanded its Finance+ add-on to 68+ apps with the price holding at $399/mo [Link]
Check out more updates on PricingSaaS →
Replit’s Free Mode and the Future of Freemium
Last week, Replit removed its Starter plan, and introduced a new “Free Mode” for paying customers, offering 30 hours of chat and 60 projects a month on top of the $20 in credits they already pay for:
It’s not the first time a company has offered free usage to paying customers. Lovable has been offering customers a free daily credit allotment for some time. Both companies still offer a free plan, but no longer list it on the pricing page.
While these are just a couple moves, I do believe they are indicative of a shift that’s happening in how companies think about offering free value — especially when paired with legacy SaaS companies (e.g., Canva) reducing free AI limits.
I believe there are 3 factors behind this shift:
1. Freemium isn’t a rounding error anymore.
Offering free templates costs Canva nothing. Offering free agent credits is a real, recurring, per-unit cost. This dynamic puts a lot more pressure on converting free users to paying customers.
2. Acquisition is way harder.
The old Freemium playbook was simple. Give away a constrained version of the product, let people build a habit, then charge them when the habit gets expensive or collaborative. That drove a lot of free sign-ups across the SaaS landscape. AI changed this dynamic. For a lot of the work free tiers used to do (e.g., the first draft, the quick design mockup, the one-off script, the rough analysis), an LLM is now the free tier.
3. Credits give you new ways to offer free value.
With per-seat pricing, “free" needed to be either a tier or a trial. A credit wallet changes that — you now have usage that touches the wallet, and usage that doesn't. Replit and Lovable are using the latter to reward paying customers and incentivize them to use the product more.
Looking at these factors holistically suggests the following shifts in how to offer free value going forward:
In terms of how to actually offer this, we’re seeing four patterns:
Free by model: Cheap model is free, frontier model spends the wallet (e.g., Replit, Windsurf, Copilot)
Free by speed: Same model, slower queue, no charge (e.g., Midjourney Relax, Leonardo's relaxed generation, Krea Max)
Free by action type. Genspark includes unlimited chat, image generation, and voice dictation at zero credit cost on Plus and Pro. Manus makes Chat mode free. Mintlify offers unlimited usage for its Writing agent.
Free refill. Lovable gives Pro and Business 5 free credits every day with no monthly cap, plus separate Cloud and AI grants that get spent before your own credits do.
The bigger point is that free-inside-paid isn't about acquisition, it’s about retention and expansion. It keeps the wallet from draining on routine work, so the balance gets spent on work that actually matters.
One caveat, because I don't want to oversell this…
Freemium is not dead. Of the 4,381 companies we track, 1,558 still have a free tier (36%). And among the 320 companies with credit-based pricing, 209 have a free plan (65%). Companies on credits are nearly twice as likely to offer free as everyone else. Also, Freemium and “free-inside-paid” are not mutually exclusive. You can do both.
The bigger takeaway is that AI is changing the economics of Freemium, and it may be worth revisiting who you’re offering free value to, how you’re offering it, and what you’re actually trying to achieve with it.
Thanks for reading! If you’re working on AI monetization and want to learn more about how we help, book time here.
Until next time,
Rob