What’s are the price points of the paid plans?

I think your thinking is not good from the start.

Why do you think you will have a lot of members even if you release a free
version?

Aim for 500 members, when you get there, aim for 1000 and so on.

This will depend a lot on how often your users use your app, how they use your
app, how you store and retrieve their data, what database you use.

99% of the time the database will be the bottleneck so be smart about how you
index and persist and normalize vs denormalize your data.

Also the vast majority of startups have too few users not too many. So I
wouldn't worry about it, I'd focus on growth and measuring load. And when the
database starts to groan optimize until and stops. And keep doing this until you
have a successful company.

It doesn’t matter at this point. You want as many free users as possible to
understand what it takes to systematically convert them to paying users. Once
you do this, you can reduce the feature set that you offer for free to that
which enables you to convert.

If you can’t convert enough free users, then you don’t have a business.

Compute and storage is cheap. Unless you have something crazy cpu intensive or
you have really bad code it probably wont be limiting factor. Probably then more
support resources needed. But I agree with the rest - focus on getting users to
really understand your users.

I really appreciate everybody's input! To speak a little bit more about the
picture, the whole idea of this Cloud app is to gather more people into my
tribe, a value add. My real money makers are big ticket software that is beside
the point of the Cloud app. However, I want to gather as many leads as possible
for that, and that is where the free stage comes into play. The Cloud app itself
is not my money maker. The main dashboard will also show my latest promotions
and other services. However, I especially don't want free users from another
country who are of no value to me to clog it up. I would see most users probably
looking in the site several times a day to check on things.

The site will be fed by another system that the customer already has on their
computer. The first tier paid customers may be synchronizing their customer list
of possibly 1,000 to 5,000 records, and an item list of maybe 1,000 to 5,000. So
if each user has that uploaded to the cloud space, I hope I don't run into
resource issues.

However, my user estimates are probably a lot lower than what some of yours
speaking about above.

First, reality check.. You won't get as many users as you are thinking. Not even
close. Second, the number of concurrent users will be extremely low and that's
the only thing that would burden your system. Third, don't worry about it until
it's a problem.

Peter Eastvold

if you disallow @hotmail.com, @google.com, etc. account registration, you will
limit noise. There are Apis to detect disposable emails too. You use asp.net
core, which likely means azure on the BE, so 20k records is nothing, especially
If free accounts expire after x days? As you said you just need to break even,
due to the upsell potential. This bar is low and I believe you don’t have to
worry about much except potential abuse.