Usually when you start offering a service one would want to try to be affordable as possible in an effort to maximize customer acquisition and company revenue. I was recently keeping track of a company’s business approach to its phone apps that they release where it seems like they always block key features for paying users as they obviously want to make money. Usually after too, if sales are meeting their expectations, they will gradually make a lot of those essential features free.
It’s almost like they intentionally do this as market research to see how much people are willing to pay and how much they can squeeze financially out of people. I don’t think that is an ideal approach in the beginning as usually the launch of a product or service is when you have the most hype and attention. Imagine the disappointment when thousands of people realize they can’t functionally use your free product without paying. A lot would leave and never come back.
It would make me think of like a restaurant where on grand opening day they make the meal portions ridiculously small to see how little they can give to people to be more profitable. Like there, that’s probably not the best thing to do as this is essentially your initial word of mouth advertising which in itself is worth a lot of money. If anything it’s probably better to be a little more generous in the beginning to leave a good impression I would imagine.