Well, sure, the marketer can say Dropbox is great. But you’re not going to trust them and you’re going to react against the message. What freemium does is it says, “Hey, don’t trust us. You don’t have to believe us. Check it out for yourself, for free.” If you like it, and you hit the two-gigabyte limit and need to upgrade to the better version, you’ve already convinced yourself it’s worth the money.

When we think about using freemium, we have to think about what we give away. If we give away too much, people will never upgrade to the premium version. If YouTube said, “Have YouTube TV free for the next 10 years,” you would never get to the point where you needed to upgrade. If The New York Times said, “Here are 50 articles a month for free,” no one would ever pay for the premium version.