A new Freemium is coming

Now that v14.24.3 has been released for all three browsers, work on v15 can begin. But first, we wanted to share some exciting news about the Free plan. Let’s cut to the chase: the current free tier is lousy. We have never been satisfied with it ourselves for three main reasons:

  1. In hindsight, 10 free profile executions a day was not enough for more users than we anticipated based on our admittedly non-scientific estimates.
  2. The free quota could be bypassed in a matter of seconds simply by reinstalling the extension.
  3. The freemium code was overly complex and hard to maintain, leading to bugs and v14 getting rejected.

With the recent overhaul of our backend and major refactoring over the past six months to get v14 approved by the Chrome Web Store (CWS) team, we feel now is the right time to replace the current freemium model with something we wish we could have introduced from the beginning, but didn’t have the time, resources, and expertise to at the time.

Here’s how it’s going to work (roughly, since we’re still in the early stages):

  • Starting with v15, every installation of Lightning Autofill will have a unique UUID, similar to a Windows license key.
  • This key will be used to request autofill time from our web service. Think of it as competing for time-share on the mainframe in the 70s. In this case, you’d be competing against all other free tier users at the time you make the request.
  • Our backend’s load balancer will use a FIFO (First In, First Out) scheduling strategy when processing the queue. If you happen to be the first in line, your wait time is naturally zero. We cannot determine the wait time ahead of time, as it depends on too many factors to discuss here (e.g., CPU time ↔ monthly budget ↔ edge caching hits vs. misses ↔ number of concurrent free users requesting autofill time ↔ form complexity and number of fields ↔ delays from WAIT actions or Advanced tab).
  • Premium users with a valid subscription key will bypass this queue entirely. There will never be a wait time for users on the Plus or Pro plan.

Again, the design can change between now and when v15 is released, depending on technical limitations, consultations, feedback, and various other factors, some of which might be unknown to us right now. Regardless of what the final design will be, you can be sure of one thing: the new Free plan will have unlimited profile executions. 🥳