Some of our earliest users might still remember that Paymo initially started out as a free tool back in 2008, mainly used by the freelance community to track time. Years have passed and the software matured as well as the company and the team developing it. We grew in complexity, size, user-base, and over time the free version of the software was phased out. For a number of years, the “freemium” model didn’t seem economically feasible and we couldn’t seem to make it work. Today we’re changing that.
As we were thinking about our New Year’s resolutions and the 10th anniversary of Paymo we decided to start off the year with a bang and re-introduce a Free Plan, but with a twist.
Starting today we’re putting Free back into FreeLancer – with a full-featured plan that allows any freelancer to grow their business at no cost, with no limitations in terms of time tracking, time reporting, and project management. We’re not talking about some feature-crippled freemium plan like you will see in other places – we want to offer a fully-featured platform with no limitations for project management and time tracking.
Over the past years, we’ve witnessed a revolution in the freelancing world and the gig-economy – it simply exploded. The gig economy in the US is now estimated to be about 34% of the workforce and expected to be 43% by the year 2020. According to some estimates, by 2027 there will be more freelance workers in the US than full-time employees.
This is quite a change and an incredible opportunity. However, we’re also witnessing some worrying trends – the biggest one in our opinion is the fact that Freelancers are getting squeezed everywhere. This is where we’d like to help out with our new plan that offers you all the basic functions you need to run and grow your freelancing business.
As a business, we still need to make money and we’re hoping to offer you that great extra functionality that you might need when your business grows, so we can grow with you.
We wish you Happy Freelancing and a great 2018!
Jan Lukacs
Author
