Want $5m Revenue? Build Free Tools Copying These 23 Examples

In this article, you will learn exactly how to use “Free Tools” to acquire new users and grow revenue for your software company, complete with real-world examples from top SaaS CEOs. These founders have used free tools, calculators, and widgets to generate millions in revenue and attract thousands of new users, often with a near-$0 customer acquisition cost.

For example, Ricardo from Betterpic revealed how his company’s “Free AI Headshot Generator” now drives over 8,000 clicks per month and generated an extra $7,000 in upsell revenue last month alone. This is the power of a well-executed Free Tool strategy. You’ll get the 4-step process to launch your own Free Tools in addition to over 40 case studies you can use as inspiration. These examples were collected directly from CEOs of companies with combined revenues over $1B when they keynoted Founderpath events.

The 4-Part Playbook for Free Tools

1. Identify a Pain Point: Find a small, specific, and painful problem your target audience faces that a simple tool can solve. Don’t try to solve their biggest problem; focus on a niche, recurring frustration. For example, HubSpot identified that marketers were unsure about their website’s performance, so they created the free Website Grader. It solved a specific pain point and became a massive lead-generation engine.
2. Build a Simple, Valuable Tool: Create a lightweight tool that delivers immediate value and solves the specific pain point you identified. It should be easy to use and require minimal setup. Lucjan Suski of Surfer SEO did this by launching Keyword Surfer, a free Chrome extension for keyword research. It was a simple tool that provided immense value to SEO professionals and grew to over 500,000 active users, creating massive brand awareness for their core product.
3. Promote the Tool as a Lead Magnet: Your free tool is your greatest marketing asset. Optimize its landing page for SEO around the problem it solves. Ricardo at Betterpic explained that their “Free AI Headshot Generator” was an intentional SEO play. They researched the term, reverse-engineered the opportunity, and built a tool that now ranks high on Google, attracting thousands of potential customers each month completely organically. Gate the results behind an email signup to build your list.
4. Create a Clear Path to Your Paid Product: The free tool should naturally lead users to your core, paid offering. The tool might solve one part of a larger problem that your full product solves completely. For Betterpic, users of the free headshot tool are put on a 3-month waiting list. If they want their results faster, they can upgrade to a discounted paid plan, creating a simple and effective upsell path that generates thousands in extra revenue.

40+ Examples of Free Tools for User Acquisition and Revenue Growth

• The CEO of Betterpic shared that their free AI headshot generator is a key growth channel, driving 8,000 clicks per month and an extra $7,000 in monthly revenue through a clever waitlist-to-paid upsell model. The company has scaled to $3.2 million in revenue in just 18 months.
• Surfer SEO’s founder, Lucjan Suski, detailed how they launched a free Chrome extension called Keyword Surfer. It exploded in popularity, attracting over 500,000 active users and becoming a massive driver of brand awareness that fueled their growth to over $15 million in ARR.
• Steve Hardi at Jotform explained their freemium model, which has attracted over 10 million users. Their strategy revolves around a free plan with usage limits (100 submissions/form) that naturally converts users to paid plans as their needs grow, fueling their journey past a $100 million run rate.
• Expandi’s founder, Stefan Smulders, used a unique free tool strategy to get started. He offered his LinkedIn automation tool for free to users of competitor tools, asking for feedback in return. This helped him acquire his first users and validate the product, leading to a $5 million ARR.
• Kyle Poyar of OpenView highlighted Grammarly’s strategy. They offer countless free web tools that answer common grammar questions. These tools rank on SEO, attract users with a specific problem, and then seamlessly introduce them to Grammarly’s core product.
• Codiga’s founder, Julian Delaine, used a freemium tool for developers to attract over 15,000 users and convert 50 of them into paying customers, demonstrating how free offerings can build a substantial top-of-funnel for technical products.
• Adam Stone of startadam.com revealed they get over 700 leads per month by offering a free integration on the Trello app store. This marketplace strategy allows them to capture users already looking for solutions within an existing ecosystem.
• Bailey Pumfleet from Cal.com explained their open-source strategy, where a powerful free, self-hosted version of their scheduling tool acts as the primary lead magnet. This model attracted thousands of users and helped them secure 50 paying customers on their launch day.
• Marco Saric of Plausible Analytics shared how their free, open-source version builds trust and community. This approach has organically attracted over 3,300 paying customers and grown their MRR from $400 to $23,000 in just over a year.
• The new owner of AutoForward SMS, Norbert Houth, took a free feature that power users loved, put a simple usage-based paywall on it, and grew the app’s revenue from $600/month to over $10,000/month.
• Andy Cloke, the founder of Data Fetcher, built his tool with a freemium model allowing 100 free API requests per month. This simple free offering has been enough to attract his first 51 paying customers and generate over $1,200 in MRR while he bootstraps the business.
• The team at Earner, a tax app for SMBs, uses a freemium model that converts an impressive 20-50% of free registrations into paid accounts, helping them scale past $20,000 in MRR.
• Chimney’s founder, Ryan Salerno, got his start by building free, embeddable financial calculators for bank websites. This strategy helped them land their first 60+ financial institutions as customers.
• Gilead Salamander from eClincher described how their free trial has a free-to-paid conversion rate of over 20%. The high-value trial acts as their most powerful conversion tool, helping them scale to over 5,000 customers and a $250k MRR.
• The founder of Datability uses a free version of their browser notification tool to attract a large user base of publishers, which they then monetize through a separate ad network model, effectively using the free tool to build a valuable audience.
• Gerry Colyer of Siftery built a completely free tool for discovering B2B software. This strategy attracted over 25,000 valuable users, creating a strong foundation before they introduced premium, paid features.
• Michael Cooney of WhatConverts explained how they use their call tracking feature as a “mousetrap” within their free trial. Users come for one specific free tool and discover a full suite of lead tracking capabilities, leading to a 70% trial-to-paid conversion rate and over $8 million in ARR.
• Arnaud Belinga of Breakcold offers a free email warmer tool as part of their freemium plan. This utility brings in users who need to improve email deliverability and then introduces them to their paid cold outreach features, helping them secure their first 53 customers.
• Greg Head, a practical founder coach, emphasizes using free resources and high-value content as a way to build an audience before launching a paid product, a strategy that many successful bootstrappers use to de-risk their launch.
• Pierre Touzeau from Clap utilized a private beta (a form of a free tool) with a 3,000-person waitlist to refine his product. After launching publicly, the refined free product attracted 7,000 signups and helped convert his first 20 paying customers, generating $5,000 in MRR.
• David Rusenko of Weebly built a $100M+ revenue business on a freemium model. Their free website builder drove massive word-of-mouth growth, attracting over 50 million users and converting a percentage of them to paid plans over time.
• Tobin Anatom from Red Brick used their in-house analytics tool, Deskmetrics, on their own free-to-use product, Shift. This not only provided a proof of concept but also helped grow Shift to 20,000 installs and a 4-5% free-to-paid conversion rate.
• Logan Burchett of Forecaster.co ran their tool in a free beta to gather feedback and users before rolling out a variable pricing model. This approach allowed them to validate the product and grow to over 550 customers and $1.4M in revenue.
• Neil Patel, speaking about UberSuggest, outlined his strategy of acquiring a tool and making it completely free. This drove millions of visitors, built a massive email list, and generated thousands of leads for his primary agency business, NP Digital.
• UserPeak’s founder, Tina Banerjee, is building her user testing tool by first offering it to a group of 40 beta testers for free. This allows her to gather critical feedback and build a pool of testers before a public, paid launch.
• Marie Martens from Tally made their form-builder tool largely free, with unlimited forms and submissions. This freemium model was key to competing with giants like Typeform, attracting over 80,000 free users and converting 3% of them to a paid Pro plan, reaching $50k MRR.
• The team at dev heads uses a free consultation and low-cost initial website build ($250) to acquire local businesses, then upsells them to a $40/month hosting and maintenance plan, creating a recurring revenue stream from a service that acts like a free tool.
• The CEO of Monetizemore offers a free Chrome extension called PubGuru Ad Inspector. This tool provides value by analyzing ad setups and then serves as a natural upsell to their core ad optimization platform, helping them grow to over $400,000 in monthly revenue.
• Matt Archer of Mahana.io is shifting from a sales-led to a product-led model by offering a free experience for his collaboration tool. He’s using feedback from his initial free beta users to build out a freemium offering to attract more signups.
• Phanindra Sama of Bip.so built a waitlist of 3,000 workspaces for his “Notion for Web3” tool before launching pricing. The free access period allowed him to identify a 10% retention rate among power users before asking anyone to pay.
• Antoine Pereira of DashThis grew his reporting tool by offering a free trial that showcases the simplicity and power of their automated dashboards. This strategy has scaled them to 2,600 customers and a $4.2 million ARR.
• Blake Burch of Shipyard uses a freemium model for their data orchestration platform that competes with open-source tools. The free plan serves as a proof-of-concept for data engineers, which has helped them land their first 30 paying customers and hit $12k MRR.
• The founder of Plotly offers powerful, open-source charting libraries for free. This has led to widespread adoption by data scientists at major companies like Tesla. They monetize by selling a paid, on-premise version for enterprises that require it, reaching over $2M in ARR.
• TerminusDB’s CEO, Luke Feeney, uses an open-source version of their graph database to drive adoption. They monetize with a hosted cloud version, a strategy that has grown them from $10k to $20k in MRR over the past year.
• The founder of Veeamly is using a private beta with 100 free users to validate her priority workspace tool. The goal is to prove stickiness (users spending 4-6 hours/day) before launching a freemium model to the public.
• Naveen SG of Leadmonk.io leveraged a freemium model and listed his tool on over 50 review sites and marketplaces for free. This built a 500-person waitlist and helped him convert his first 50 paying customers in just 45 days.
• Marie, the founder of Llama Life, initially launched her productivity app for free, then introduced a one-time payment, and eventually a subscription. She is now considering re-introducing a free tier to drive user growth after raising a pre-seed round.
• Vitalii Davydov of Adapty offers a free plan for their mobile paywall A/B testing tool, with a paid Pro plan that starts at $99/month. The pricing scales with the customer’s revenue, creating a built-in expansion model.
• Raffle.ai’s CEO, Suzanne Lauritzen, launched a free tier for their enterprise search tool. This allows users to experience the full service with most features, acting as a powerful lead magnet for their enterprise plans which average $25,000 per year.
• Albert Santalo of 8base offers their front-end low-code development tools for free to drive adoption. They monetize on the back-end services with a usage-based model, a strategy that helped them raise a $10.6 million Series A.
• Brendan Falk at Fig has made his developer tool free for individuals and open-source projects. This focus on adoption has attracted tens of thousands of monthly active users and over 150 contributors, with a plan to monetize via enterprise deals in the future.
• Jack Becker of Uptime.app launched his knowledge hacking app with a free trial and a “Founder Offer” to convert his first several thousand paying subscribers from a base of over 100,000 sign-ups.
• Digits CEO Jeff Seibert has spent four years building distribution and a waitlist for his free real-time finance dashboard. The strategy is to build a massive user base with a valuable free tool before launching paid enterprise features, a playbook that helped him raise $30 million pre-revenue.
• The founder of GrowSurf, Kevin Yoon, uses a freemium model for his referral software. This allows tech startups to try the platform and see value before committing to a paid plan, which has helped him bootstrap to $26,000 in MRR.

Conclusion

You’ve just learned how top SaaS founders use “Free Tools” as a powerful growth engine to attract thousands of users and drive millions in revenue. By identifying a specific pain point, building a simple solution, and creating a natural upsell path, these CEOs have turned free offerings into their most effective customer acquisition channel. To get your own SaaS valuation and discover more data-driven growth tactics, use the free tools available at Founderpath.com.

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