Changes to Directual Free plan

Nowadays, everything is in rapid motion, and so is Directual. The time has come for us to make adjustments to our freemium and trial modes. Discover what will happen to the Free plan and how the trial period will work on our no-code platform.

Discontinuation of the Free plan

Directual has offered the Free plan for years, and we’ve had plenty of time to see how well it performs for our target audience, and whether it’s actually harmful to new users rather than the other way around.

OK, hear us out. 

Based on our data, the tight limits of the Free plan and no time limit to try something worthwhile hindered the progress of a given test project. Without a deadline in mind, test projects get abandoned, and users are reluctant to create anything advanced without committing to a paid plan first.

What’s more, tons upon tons of basic projects and experimentation on the Free plan (sometimes recurring in very strange patterns) are a drain on Directual’s resource pool. We would rather provide said resources to the users serious about continuing with the platform and trying out its full potential. 

Lastly, after a tight discourse with our community, we’ve learned that the lack of a deadline on the Free plan also discouraged new users from learning how the platform works.

"I’ll do it tomorrow — got my whole life to learn it after all!” — some users used to suppose.

This, in our eyes, is the main killer of the drive to create. After all, we’ve got an entire Directual academy full of educational videos, examples, and other materials to truly get the most out of the platform in no time. 

Anyhow.

The Free plan is about to walk off a cliff. But that doesn’t mean our newcomers can’t test Directual at all before committing to a paid plan. Here’s how the trial period will work.

Do note: starting May 17th, all apps on the Free plan will be transferred to the Startup plan trial mode, and if no card or payment method is added within 2 weeks, the apps will be blocked.

How the trial period will work from now on

First and foremost: you won’t be charged for things you don’t want to pay for after activating a trial period. We’re not Adobe or Planet Fitness to hold your credit card hostage—canceling anything is easy and there are no extra surcharges. 

The trial period will depend on the pricing plan you’d like to try. Here’s the breakdown:

The Startup plan 

You don’t need your credit card added in the billing section to try it. The trial period will last for 2 weeks, and you get a monthly resource limit to your name to try and build things. 

The Pro plan

The next pricing tier trial period will last longer - 4 weeks instead of 2. However, to activate it, Directual will request a token of $1 to get started. 

Based on our experience, usually, it makes things much easier for the client since they can control the billing and avoid thinking about adding the card at the end of the trial period. Yeah it doesn’t make much sense, but do look up “cart abandonment” — it’s the same thing.

In case you’d rather not commit your credit card details to our billing during the trial period (which is understandable, of course), you also pay via crypto or payment services. 

Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, NEAR, Polygon, Ethereum, Mir cards, and even wire payments are supported. 

Promo codes

This change also concerns promo codes, since they can be used for both paid plans and on-demand resource consumption. Now, if you want to activate a promo code, you will also need to either use a card, payment processor, or crypto. No charges, though. 

If your account is already active in one way or another (based on the requirements for the pricing plan itself), you won’t need to do that.

As much as we’d like to keep the Freemium model going, we are sure that this is the right decision, and it took a lot of consideration to commit to this new strategy. We’ll see how it will perform—Directual is as flexible and fast as the apps our users make. 

Afterword

This change to Directual is likely to spark conversation, and we’re happy to answer any questions you might have about our pricing model, trials, and any other questions too. Just let us know by sending a message to hello@directual.com or head into our Discord, Telegram, and Facebook communities (the links are in the footer below).