If you've looked at software pricing lately, you've probably noticed that "free" comes in a lot of different flavors. Some of them feel generous. Others feel like a trap.
We've spent a lot of time thinking about this at DhyanaTech, and we wanted to share our approach—not because we think we've figured everything out, but because we believe you deserve to know how we're thinking about it.
The Problem With "Free"
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely has demonstrated something fascinating about the word "free." In experiments, people will choose a free item over a dramatically better deal, simply because zero carries no risk. It's not rational, but it's deeply human.
The software industry knows this. And unfortunately, some companies have learned to exploit it.
You've probably encountered the patterns: apps that are free but frustrating, designed to wear you down until you pay. Free tiers that harvest your data as the real product. Subscription traps with easy sign-ups and labyrinthine cancellation processes. Games engineered to identify the small percentage of users susceptible to compulsive spending—industry insiders call them "whales"—and extract as much money as possible.
Researchers have documented these tactics extensively. They even have a name for the manipulative design choices: dark patterns. Studies show that users increasingly recognize when they're being manipulated, and it erodes trust—not just in the specific product, but in software generally.
This concerns us. Not just as a business, but as people who use software ourselves.
What We're Trying to Do Differently
At DhyanaTech, we build tools based on a philosophy we call Artificial Mindfulness—the idea that technology should reduce cognitive friction, not create it. Software should help you think more clearly, not exploit the quirks in how your brain works.
That philosophy has to extend to pricing. If our tools are designed to give you peace of mind, it doesn't make sense to fund them through anxiety-inducing business models.
So here's how we've structured things, and why:
DhyanaPM: Free for Individuals, Forever
If you're an individual—a freelancer, a student, someone managing personal projects—you can use DhyanaPM without paying anything, for as long as you want. No ads. No data harvesting. No artificial limitations designed to frustrate you into upgrading.
Why? Because project management is a skill that develops over time. You might use the tool for months on personal projects before you're ever in a position to bring it to an organization. Or you might be a solo practitioner who genuinely never needs collaboration features. We didn't want to put a clock on that.
Paid plans unlock team features—shared projects, collaboration tools, organizational dashboards. These features only matter when there's actually a team involved. We're not withholding something you need; we're offering additional capabilities that scale with your situation.
If you use DhyanaPM individually for years and never upgrade, that's completely fine. Maybe someday you'll see a reason to bring it to your workplace. Maybe you won't. Either way, we'd rather have you getting value from the tool than feeling nickel-and-dimed.
DhyanaCFO: One Month Free, Full Access
Financial software is different. You can't really evaluate accounting tools in a day or a week—you need to see how they handle real workflows. Processing payroll. Reconciling accounts. Generating reports. These things happen on monthly cycles.
So DhyanaCFO gives you a full month with complete access to everything. No feature gates, no credit card required upfront, no "premium" tier dangled in front of you. Just the actual product, for enough time to genuinely know whether it works for your situation.
After that month, you'll have real data to make a real decision. Not a decision based on urgency or confusion or sunk-cost psychology—a decision based on whether this tool actually helps you.
Democratizing Access
There's another piece to this that matters to us.
Small business owners, solo founders, freelancers—these folks often can't afford the enterprise software that larger companies take for granted. They end up either cobbling together inadequate free tools, paying for software that's way more complex than they need, or just going without.
We think that's a problem. Good project management and financial compliance tools shouldn't only be accessible to companies with six-figure software budgets. Part of what we're trying to do with DhyanaTech is make genuinely useful, thoughtfully designed software available to people who are usually priced out of it.
That's not charity—it's a business model. We believe that if we build something valuable and price it fairly, enough people will pay for it. We don't need to manipulate anyone. We just need to be good at what we do.
Our Concerns (Because We Have Them)
We'd be lying if we said we had this all figured out.
The research on freemium models is sobering. Conversion rates are typically low—often 2-5%. That means you need a large user base to sustain a business, and supporting free users costs real money. Companies smarter than us have struggled with this math.
We also worry about the line between "demonstrating value" and "creating dependency." We don't want someone using our software for years, building their workflows around it, and then feeling trapped when they hit a paywall. That's not mindful—that's manipulative with a longer timeline.
So we're trying to be thoughtful about where the free/paid boundaries sit. The question we keep asking ourselves is: Does this boundary reflect a genuine difference in value, or are we just trying to manufacture a reason for people to pay?
We don't always get it right. But we're trying to get it right.
What We're Asking From You
If you use our tools—free or paid—we'd genuinely like to hear how the model feels from your side. Does the free tier feel generous or does it feel like a trick? Are the upgrade prompts helpful or annoying? Is there something we're doing that feels manipulative, even if we didn't intend it that way?
We're building this company on the idea that software can be calmer, clearer, and more respectful of the people who use it. That includes how we ask you to pay for it.
Thanks for reading this far. And thanks for giving us a chance to earn your trust.
DhyanaTech builds mindful productivity tools for individuals and small businesses. Learn more at dhyanatech.com.
References
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Shampanier, K., Mazar, N., & Ariely, D. (2007). Zero as a special price: The true value of free products. Marketing Science, 26(6), 742-757.
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Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. HarperCollins.
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Gray, C. M., Kou, Y., Battles, B., Hoggatt, J., & Toombs, A. L. (2018). The Dark (Patterns) Side of UX Design. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1-14.
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Gray, C. M., Chen, J., Chivukula, S. S., & Qu, L. (2021). End User Accounts of Dark Patterns as Felt Manipulation. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW2), Article 372.
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Brignull, H. (2010). Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design. A List Apart.
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Kumar, V. (2014). Making 'Freemium' Work: Many Start-ups Fail to Recognize the Challenges of This Popular Business Model. Harvard Business Review, 92(5), 27-29.
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OpenView Partners. (2020). Product Benchmarks Survey: Freemium vs. Free Trial Conversion Rates.
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Seufert, E. (2014). Freemium Economics: Leveraging Analytics and User Segmentation to Drive Revenue. Morgan Kaufmann.
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Anderson, C. (2009). Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Hyperion.