AuthenticMatters

Pay and We’ll Remove Our “Powered By” Logo!

We’ve all seen freemium models that encourage users to convert to paid by the “if you convert to paid, our branding goes away!” promoting pressure. Sometimes that might be a decent enough incentive. Sometimes a userbase will say, “Meh… I don’t mind your branding.”

And this brings up an interesting decision point: if you’re going to take this approach, you need to play out a couple scenarios before making the call…

If I’m using a product’s free version and the paid selling point is to have a “powered by [LOGO]” removed, the logo needs to be juuuuuust glaring enough that I’d at least consider my user experience without it. I need to be able to say, “Yeah, you know what? If the company’s logo wasn’t slapped on here, I’d be happier. They can have their $9.99.”

However, if the freemium branding skews too much towards cool (aka, not glaring at all), the majority of users won’t care - and worse yet… they’ll like it. If the “powered by [LOGO]” becomes a badge of cool, you’re sunk.

Another “however” scenario… What if the “powered by [LOGO]” is so God-awful that it’s halting potential users from even signing up for the freemium version? (Needless to say, a branding exercise is on the horizon.)

So it’s certainly a gray area. One solution? Avoid the “pay and we’ll remove our logo” model. It’s much more effective to convert free users to paid (aka: high-value) on additional functionality that they really want than it is to sell on brand removal.