Recently, the Beehiiv Analytics tool I’d been beta testing came out of beta and became a feature of the Scale plan. Beehiiv had warned me of this when I signed up, but it still came as a blow to me, since I had been so heavily reliant on the lightweight, privacy-focused tracker. After coming out of beta, it will only show me very basic information: pretty much just the number of page views in the previous 30 days. I dealt with it for a while, but, the other day, I decided I wanted to have insight into who was looking at my blog again.

I had remembered looking at Jeff Porter’s list of European alternatives to popular software products, so I figured I’d give one of his alternatives to Google Analytics a shot. I quickly landed on Alceris, a German-hosted, lightweight analytics tool which was free for up to 10k monthly page views. I get a little under that, more like 7k, so I decided to go with it.

After creating an account, I was brought to setup, where I received a snippet to paste into the HTML code of my website. In a normal situation this would be easy, but Beehiiv demands a lot of control. I couldn’t put any custom code in the website, at all. To do that, I would need to upgrade to the Scale plan, which, again, I didn’t want to do.

I tried to find a workaround, and realized that Beehiiv will let you put a custom Google Tag Manager tag on your website. (Now, if I were really trying to make a statement about how I feel about American tech—like I see so many in the fediverse doing—this would sort of defeat the purpose. However, I’m American, so I don’t particularly care. I use Gmail and Google Docs every day anyway.) I added an HTML Snippet tag to GTM, and published it.

I then went back to Alceris, where I received a number of page views from “https://gtm-msr.appspot.com/render/.” This was a minor annoyance, as I realized I was receiving false page-views. I quickly sorted those out and did some proper testing, where I got some real data into my pageviews.

Alceris is privacy-focused, lightweight, and doesn’t collect any extra data, so I’m very happy with where I’ve landed.¹ However, I’m upset at Beehiiv on two accounts: both that they took away my analytics and that they made it so hard for me to add custom HTML snippets.

I know that I’m on the free plan, but it seems to me I should still be treated with some respect as a customer. I signed up for Beehiiv hoping it would be more freeing than Substack (and I had no need for as much freedom as Ghost offers). I’ve been pleased with it for the past five months. But I’m starting to rethink my decision. I want to be able to add whatever I want to my blog and not be artificially limited by basic software. I'll probably stay, but not without my reservations.

This got me thinking about freemium software as a whole (hence the title of this post). If Beehiiv’s goal is really to convert me to a paying customer, which it is, then shouldn’t the strategy be to get the user to be so happy that they want to pay, rather than being forced to upgrade because of gatekept features?

I think too many freemium companies go with the latter, because it’s easier. They can simply decide that their advanced features/full-fledged software is behind a “Pro” plan, and not have to go through the pains of making their users love the free version of their software.

But as I’ve said before, people should love your software product, and you should design it with users loving it in mind. Otherwise you’ve failed to create a worthwhile piece of software—when some of the best programs (like Arc), were things that became instant fan favorites.

If Beehiiv had been studded with great UX features and felt like somebody cared about taking the program to the next level, I would have been more than happy to consider upgrading (I probably wouldn’t have, though, as I’m only twelve). But gatekeeping features just so I’m forced to upgrade isn’t going to make me happy.

In my opinion, Beehiiv should want millions of happy, free, users who can write about how much they love Beehiiv and refer others to the platform, who then might become paying users. Trying to turn all of your free users into paid users isn’t necessarily going to keep them happy, and they won’t write about it. In turn, you don’t get the positive community, and I would guess in most cases don’t actually get more paid subscriptions in the end.

If any SaaS executives are reading this: It might be time to rethink making customers pay. Invest all of the effort you’re spending on making dozens of subscribe pop-ups into making your customers happy, and the payments might come flowing in. But I’d love to hear from any actual founders who can tell me why I’m wrong!