Tally.so — freemium where the free tier IS the product

Snapshot

Three-tier freemium. Free is the whole page; Pro and Business are add-ons.

No "most popular" badge. No free trial on paid tiers (you don't need one — the free tier is the trial). Monthly/annual toggle with 2 months free on yearly.

Hero line above pricing: "Build beautiful forms for free!" Supporting copy: "Tally gives you unlimited forms and submissions, completely free, as long as you stay within our fair usage guidelines."

What works

1. The free tier is so generous it reads almost uncomfortable.

Unlimited forms. Unlimited submissions. All 20+ integrations — Zapier, Make, Notion, Google Sheets, Airtable, webhooks. Payments, signatures, file uploads, conditional logic. For 95% of buyers who've ever paid Typeform, Tally's free tier is the product. This isn't a funnel with a trap door; it's a trapdoor pretending to be a funnel. That's the strongest freemium move on the market right now — build the free tier so good that converting becomes a mark of affection, not necessity.

2. "Remove Tally branding" as the primary pro upsell.

This is classic SaaS, but Tally does it honestly. The free tier is functionally complete; you pay €20 not to unlock features, but to make the output look like your product instead of theirs. The buyer's mental math is cleaner: "I got $X of value, now I pay to dress it up." Every form embedded on a paying customer's site is also a visible Tally ad on a freeloader's site — the branding toggle is both a revenue lever and a growth engine.

3. Big logos do the work of risk reduction.

Freemium depends on trust: you're betting that the company won't rug-pull the free tier in 18 months. Showing Notion, Make, Buy Me a Coffee, Glovo, Rakuten above the pricing makes that bet feel safe. "500,000+ teams" is the supporting metric. Together they convert the anxious indie buyer who's been burned by Airtable's free-tier squeeze — Tally looks like it can afford to keep being generous.

4. Localization as a free-tier feature.

45+ languages and RTL support, free. For most form builders this is a paid upgrade or a hack. Tally includes it free because international indie SaaS founders (Europe, APAC, LATAM) are a huge chunk of their target — and giving them free localization is a low-cost moat against Typeform, which charges for even basic i18n.

5. Pro unlocks are all about identity, not capability.

Custom domain, custom CSS, link preview customization, custom email domains. The €20 is a "make it mine" tier, not a "do more" tier. This is the right upsell for freemium because it aligns the pay moment with the buyer's psychological moment — "I've used this enough that I want it to look like mine." Pricing a tier on identity is harder to copy and easier to justify than pricing on features.

What doesn't

1. No name on the free tier.

"Free" is a price, not a product. The absence of a tier name (e.g. "Tally Starter," "Tally Core") makes the free user feel like a squatter rather than a customer of a specific product. Named free tiers ("Notion Free," "Figma Starter") outperform unnamed ones because the buyer identifies as a tier member — and tier members upgrade to adjacent tiers more reliably than squatters upgrade to paid.

2. The Pro → Business jump is 3.25× for a small feature delta.

€20 → €65 is a steep step. What Business adds: controlled data retention, email verification, 30→90 day version history, "more to come." For a 30-person org, €65/mo is fine. For a 10-person team that cares about data retention, €65 is 3× their current spend to fix one concern. The price jump would be easier to justify if Business also added SSO, audit logs, or a named "Teams" intermediate tier. Right now the gap between Pro and Business is a chasm rather than a step.

3. No individual tier below Pro.

A solo indie founder running a landing page might care about custom domain + remove-branding and nothing else. €20/mo for those two features alone feels high — especially given that the entire product is otherwise free. A €9/mo "Personal" tier that unlocks just branding + custom domain would convert a measurable slice of solo freemium users who stall at Pro. Tally is leaving this tier on the table.

4. No "most popular" anchor.

Three-tier pricing pages convert better with one middle anchor. Free, Pro, Business could be Free, Pro (★ most popular for founders), Business, and the Pro tier would carry more conversion. Without an anchor, the reader's eye bounces to the cheapest and the most expensive — Tally effectively gets the two tiers they want least.

5. "Fair usage guidelines" is a footnote-shaped landmine.

The free tier is "unlimited... subject to fair usage guidelines" with a link. That phrase is a cognitive stop-sign for the anxious buyer. They don't read the linked doc; they just note "there's a catch somewhere" and lose some of the enthusiasm the unlimited framing built. Tally would be better served by either (a) stating the soft cap explicitly ("10k submissions/mo, raised on request") or (b) dropping the phrase entirely and handling abuse privately. The footnote creates fear without creating clarity.

What I'd steal

If your product is freemium or you're considering going freemium:

• If you go free, go genuinely free. A 10-response/mo limit isn't freemium — it's a crippled trial. Tally's free tier is the product, and that's why people pay €20 to remove the branding. Anything less generous and nobody would bother.
• Upsell on identity, not capability. The first paid tier should make the free product feel like the buyer's. Custom domain, remove branding, custom colors, custom email. Doing this right means the free tier never feels crippled — it feels branded by the vendor, which is a very different psychological state.
• Use your logos and your user count above the pricing, not just in the hero. Freemium trust is fragile. Social proof at the pricing section is where the buyer decides whether to trust the free tier with their business.
• Name your free tier. "Tally Free" or "Tally Core" is better than "€0." A named tier is an identity; an unnamed one is a handout.
• Put a "most popular" badge on your middle tier, always. Three-tier pages without one leak conversion to the cheapest option.

What I'd rewrite

Add a Personal tier between Free and Pro.

Personal — €9/mo

For solo founders, freelancers, and indie sites.

Includes: remove Tally branding, custom domain, custom CSS.

(Everything else comes from the Free tier.)

Three benefits:

1. Captures the solo-indie upgrade path that currently dies at €20.
2. Anchors Pro better — at €20, Pro now reads as "team tier" rather than "individual tier," which is what it actually is.
3. Creates a €9 conversion event, which in aggregate is more volume than the €20 event because the decision cost is ~⅓ the size.

The Personal tier wouldn't cannibalize Pro. It would convert freemium squatters who currently never pay.

Peel #01 · #02 · #03 — pricing philosophy side-by-side

Three pricing pages, three different theories of what a tier is: capacity (Plausible), usage ladder (Fathom), identity ladder (Tally). Your product is one of these, not all three — and figuring out which one costs you the next 12 months if you get it wrong.

The peel in one sentence

Tally is proof that the strongest freemium move isn't a cap-limited trial pretending to be a free tier — it's a fully usable product you can afford to give away because the conversion moment is "make it mine," not "unlock what I already need."