Why does Levity start with a paid plan instead of offering a freemium tier or free trial like many other SaaS or cloud-based companies?

Initially, we were completely closed. So, people just signed up and shared some information. We reached out to them and manually onboarded everyone. We were very deliberate with that. 

Now, we're in the position where we only have a paid plan. The reason we do this is because we want to filter people and only get those that are 100% committed, know what they want to do, and are willing to pay. However, we will also have a free trial that anyone can get started with very soon.

Why we haven’t done it yet is also because of the infrastructure challenges we faced in the beginning. How can we support thousands of models concurrently? If one person trains ten models and if we have a hundred users, that would already be a thousand models. That's a challenge we needed to solve first before opening up further.

The next step for us will be a free trial. Maybe in the future – and it's definitely a goal – we will also have a free plan of some sort to really lower the barrier for people to get started and experience the product. It wasn't easy to build a product in a way where this was actually possible without us being exposed to cost and scaling risks.