Your competitor launched a free tier. Read the limits.

Your sales lead posts a link in Slack at 9:40 on a Tuesday. The competitor now has a "Free forever" plan. Three people reply with the same question within ten minutes: do we need one too?

Not yet. A free tier is not a price. It is a list of limits, and the limits tell you exactly which customer the competitor wants and which one it is happy to lose. Read them first. Decide later.

This playbook covers the first week. It assumes you already have a baseline of the competitor's pricing page. If you don't, start there — the steps below depend on a "before" to compare against.

Step 1: Capture the plan before it changes (day 0)

Launch-week free tiers move. The caps you see on day 0 are often adjusted by day 10, after the competitor sees who signed up.

• Save the pricing page, the plan comparison table and the pricing FAQ as they are today. Store the date and the source URL with each one.
• Pull the same pages from the Wayback Machine for the last 90 days. See Wayback pricing archaeology for the method.
• Check the signup flow. Note if the free plan asks for a card, a work email or a phone number. Each of those is a filter.
• Note which plan was the cheapest paid plan yesterday. If that plan disappeared, the free tier replaced it, and that is a different story.

Step 2: Read the caps as a targeting brief (day 1)

Every limit on a free plan is a choice about who should stay and who should leave. Write the caps in a table with three columns: the limit, the value and the customer it excludes.

• Seat limits show the team size they want to convert. A cap of 3 seats targets founders and very small teams.
• Usage limits (projects, records, API calls, events) show where the paid value starts. The first cap a real customer hits is the true price of the free plan.
• Feature gates show what they think is worth money. SSO, audit logs and permissions behind the paywall mean they still sell to companies, not individuals.
• Retention limits (7 days of history, 30 days of logs) push teams to pay without a hard stop. These limits are the hardest to see in a launch post.

If the caps are generous on seats and strict on usage, they want a land-and-expand motion. If the caps are strict on seats and generous on usage, they want individual users to become champions inside companies.

Step 3: Walk the upgrade path (days 1–2)

Sign up for the free plan with a test account if their terms allow it. Our post on what competitor research is allowed covers the line.

• Use the product until you hit a cap. Record the exact message, the screen and the call to action.
• Note the price the upgrade prompt shows. It is sometimes different from the public pricing page.
• Watch the email sequence for 7 days. Count the emails, note the day each one arrives and what each one asks you to do.
• Check if the upgrade prompt goes to self-serve checkout or to "Talk to sales". That one detail tells you if the free tier feeds a sales team or replaces one.

Step 4: Check your own exposure (days 2–3)

Now compare their free plan to your entry plan, line by line. The question is narrow: which of your current customers could do their job on the competitor's free plan?

• Pull your customers on the cheapest plan. Compare their real usage to the competitor's caps.
• Ask support and sales for any churn reason or lost deal that mentions price in the last 60 days.
• Separate two groups: customers who would fit inside the free caps, and customers who would hit a cap in the first month. Only the first group is at risk.

For most teams, the at-risk group is smaller than the Slack thread suggests. The decision is about that group, not about the whole market. Our story of nearly matching a price cut shows what happens when you skip this step.

Step 5: Set a 30-day watch, then decide (days 3–7)

You don't have enough information on day 3 to change your pricing. You do have enough to know what to watch.

• Watch the pricing page and the plan table for changes to the caps. A cap that goes down in week 2 means the free tier attracted the wrong users.
• Watch their job postings for support and onboarding roles. A free tier with real volume needs people to handle it.
• Watch their changelog for features that move between plans.
• Book a decision meeting for day 30. Bring the cap changes, the at-risk customer count and any lost deals. Leave the launch post out of the room.

This is the part of the week that usually breaks. People check the pricing page on day 1, then forget it. Seeto watches the pricing page, the plan table and the FAQ continuously and records each edit as a dated change event, so a cap that drops from 5 projects to 3 on day 12 shows up as a diff instead of a surprise. Seeto does not tell you whether to launch your own free plan — that call needs your usage data and your judgment.

The point

A competitor's free tier is the most honest pricing document it will publish this year. Every cap is a decision it made about who is worth serving for free. Read those decisions before you copy them.