Only 25 of 449 business tools we track start free; Dropbox's payers are 2.6%

01Free tiers live in IT operations and developer tools, not in security

TechBag’s category guides carry a row for every product they compare, each with a published price, a pricing unit or “quote”. We read every row as the guides stood on 30 September 2026 and marked those that name a free tier, a free edition or a price starting at zero.

The security rows that do start free are mostly open source or open core: Wazuh, Elastic Security and Elastic Defend, Xcitium OpenEDR, HashiCorp Vault, and Cloudflare’s zero-trust plan. None of the identity, privileged-access, email-security, DLP, DSPM or managed detection products in the guides offers one.¹

The opposite of freemium is the more common model. Nearly half of all rows, 225 of 493, print no price at all and ask the buyer to request a quote. Between the two sits the large middle: a published per-seat or per-device price, sometimes with a time-limited trial, which lets a team test the product without the vendor committing to support free users for ever.¹

02The funnel is narrow, and it is supposed to be

Dropbox is the rare freemium company that publishes both ends of its funnel. Its second-quarter 2026 results reported 18.19 million paying users, against 18.13 million a year earlier, at an average of US$139.68 a year each; the same release describes more than 700 million registered users.² The free plan, Dropbox Basic, is 2 GB of storage on up to three devices.³

The 2023 post listed “revenue constraints” as a drawback of freemium. Dropbox shows what that means in practice: a free base of hundreds of millions, a paying base that grew by about 60,000 in a year, and total revenue up 0.9% to US$631.5 million for the quarter. The free base is no longer the growth engine; it is the shop window.²

HubSpot, the second 2023 example, runs a different kind of funnel. Its free CRM is not a cut-down product to be outgrown on storage; it is the database the paid hubs are sold on top of. Two users and 1,000 contacts is enough to put a small sales team’s pipeline in it.⁴ Once the pipeline lives there, the paid tiers for marketing, sales and service are upgrades to a system the team already depends on, which is a stronger position for the vendor than any storage cap. The cost of leaving grows with every record, and that is the part of a free CRM a buyer should price.

03Where the free tier stops

Every free tier ends somewhere, and the line is the vendor’s real price list. In the rows we counted, the limits fall into four kinds. Knowing which kind you are on tells you when the invoice arrives.

Seat limits are the friendliest: you know the day you hire the next person. Volume limits arrive with growth and are easy to miss, because nobody watches the endpoint or resource count until the tool stops. Postman, Terraform, SonarQube and Sonatype’s figures come from TechBag’s developer tools guide⁶; Action1’s from the RMM and patch guide⁷; and the ManageEngine Remote Access Plus free edition, for ten computers, from the remote access guide.⁸ HubSpot’s free CRM terms are on its own pricing page.⁴

Three habits keep a free tier from becoming a surprise. First, write down the limit that will bind first, whether seats, endpoints, contacts or storage, and the month you expect to reach it. Second, find out what happens at the limit: some tools stop, some pause new data, some keep working and bill you. Third, export something once, early, so you know the way out works before you need it. None of this costs money; all of it is easier while the account is small.

04The three 2023 examples, re-checked

The original post named three companies that ran freemium well. Read against their own pages in 2026, two still do, and the third had already stopped.

Hootsuite’s decision, reported in February 2023, is the useful one. The company said it removed the free plan so its plan structure would match the product’s growth, and free users had to pay or leave.⁵ A team that learned of it from those February reports had about five weeks to move a social media workflow or start paying. That is the buyer’s version of the freemium risk the 2023 post did not discuss.