# I'm Brendan Schwartz, Co-Founder and CTO of Wistia. AMA 💞

**URL:** <https://gorelay.co/t/im-brendan-schwartz-co-founder-and-cto-of-wistia-ama/331>\
**Category:** AMAs\
**Tags:** past-guests, fundraising, hiring, goal-setting, pricing, pmf\
**Created:** [April 13, 2020, 4:21pm UTC](https://gorelay.co/t/im-brendan-schwartz-co-founder-and-cto-of-wistia-ama/331 "2020-04-13T16:21:18Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 29

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**Author:** ![brendan](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/gorelay.co/brendan/32/152_2.png) [@brendan](https://gorelay.co/u/brendan)\
**Post date:** [April 16, 2020, 3:39pm UTC](https://gorelay.co/t/im-brendan-schwartz-co-founder-and-cto-of-wistia-ama/331/29 "2020-04-16T15:39:42Z")

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> [@naren](#):
>
> Hey Brendan,
> 
> Thanks for doing this AMA! 🙂
> 
> 1. How did you arrive at your pricing structure? I’m intrigued by its simplicity. Why freemium and not free trial even when there is a fixed infrastructure (hosting) cost for every video uploaded to Wistia?
> 2. Your customers on the Free plan will have a need to upgrade to Pro ONLY if they create more than 3 videos per month. How do you enable your customers to create more videos every month?
> 
> Take care, stay safe!
> 
> Cheers,  
> Naren

Hi Naren! Thanks for the questions.

1. We’ve probably changed our pricing over a hundred times since starting Wistia. The current iteration has been largely untouched for a few years now though and has been working well for us, particularly having videos as a value metric. Before this, usage was more or less unlimited, so we had customers getting huge amount of value and paying very little. In this mode, the price more or less scales with value. It’s imperfect (a single video is worth different amounts to different businesses) but all pricing is. We have talked about shifting to a free trial instead of a free plan since three videos is limiting to a lot of businesses. In general, I am a fan of freemium if your free plan can be truly useful to folks. Yes, it will cost you money, but I think of it as a marketing and acquisition expense.
2. We’re very happy to have someone using us for free with three videos and never upgrading. They’ll likely tell other people about the product if they’re getting value from it. Regarding helping people make more videos, we do this indirectly through our content ([The Beginner's Guide to Video Production](https://wistia.com/series/getting-started-with-video)). But you’re right, the product itself doesn’t make videos for you. That’s always been something that’s limited us, but our thesis was and is is that more businesses are making more videos every day and that will continue indefinitely, so there’s plenty of opportunity, even if we can’t directly accelerate that trend as much as we’d like to. We do also have a product called Soapbox that helps you make professional-looking videos very quickly: [Screen and Webcam Recorder - Soapbox is Now in Wistia](https://wistia.com/soapbox).

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