“We went very far into shutting down all the features and trying to frustrate a lot of users — and you know, in the end, degrading the user experience actually doesn't provide any good outcome. Because all what you do is showing your free users that your product is absolutely not satisfying on a free basis — and they just leave and use another service.”

Degrading the Free Experience Just Shows Users the Product Is Unsatisfying

Deezer tried converting freemium users by making the free tier worse — removing features, adding friction. The result: users left for Spotify rather than upgrading. The lesson: free-tier degradation signals that the product has no inherent value without payment, which destroys trust. The better path is to make the paid tier so compelling that users want to upgrade, while keeping the free tier useful enough to retain and evangelize.