Loom (Screen recording for marketing video)
Created by: Joe Thomas, Shahed Khan, Vinay Hiremath (acquired by Atlassian in 2023)

Loom prices free-with-branding plus team-subscription upsell. The free tier is the marketing engine; team adoption is the monetization.

TL;DR: Loom's pricing structure is built around the product-is-the-marketing flywheel: the free tier (with Loom branding on every video) seeds the visible-output flywheel, and team subscriptions monetize the workflow once a team adopts async video as standard practice. The lesson for indie founders: when your product creates publicly-shareable artifacts, free-with-branding can be the most efficient acquisition channel — but the upgrade trigger must align with team-scale adoption, not individual feature gates.

What they sell: An async video communication platform — screen recording with webcam overlay, instant shareable links, viewer analytics, team workspaces.
Who it's for: Distributed teams, customer success operators, sales teams, engineering teams — anyone whose communication includes async video updates.
Pricing model: Freemium with team-scale upgrade trigger and Loom branding flywheel
Payment frequency: Monthly or annual with annual discount; per-user pricing on paid tiers
Free trial behavior: Starter free tier IS the trial; Business and Business + AI offer time-limited trials for team evaluation.
Number of tiers: 4

Anchor pattern: Business + AI tier as anchor
Business + AI at approximately $20/user/mo anchors the page above Business at approximately $12.50. The price gap (60% premium) makes Business read as the affordable team tier; the AI version is the upgrade option for teams that specifically want AI features. Enterprise sits ready for procurement-driven buyers. The structural anchor is the Business tier itself — calibrated to be the obvious adoption choice for teams ready to commit.

Upgrade trigger: Video-count cap plus team-adoption moment
Two triggers fire: the 25-video cap on Starter forces individual heavy users to upgrade; the team-adoption moment (when a team decides async video is part of their workflow) drives broader Business-tier conversion. The video-count trigger is mechanical and individual; the team-adoption trigger is structural and organizational. Both contribute to Loom's conversion rate.

What's working:
Free tier with Loom branding seeds the visible-output flywheel — every shared video is implicit marketing.|Video-count cap (25 on Starter) is a predictable trigger for individual heavy users.|Team-adoption moment is the structural trigger for broader Business tier conversion.|AI as separate tier (not add-on) captures AI revenue from teams already willing to upgrade.|Per-user pricing aligns the bill with team scale, which matches how async-video adoption spreads through organizations.|Atlassian acquisition (2023) keeps the platform funded while preserving the indie-friendly brand on marketing surfaces.

What to adapt:
If your product creates publicly-shareable artifacts, free-with-branding is the most efficient acquisition channel — but the artifacts must be high-value enough that recipients want to use the product themselves.|Layer triggers: mechanical (count caps) for individual conversion, structural (team-adoption moments) for broader conversion. Both contribute to total conversion rate.|When AI is the forward-state expectation, pricing it as a separate tier rather than add-on works if buyers self-segment cleanly — teams that want AI know they want it.

What to avoid:
Do not adopt free-with-branding if your product output is internal-only. The flywheel needs publicly-visible artifacts to compound.|Do not skip the team-adoption trigger by relying only on individual feature caps. Async-video adoption spreads through teams; individual triggers undermonetize the team conversion path.

Brunson lens:
Stack: Four-rung stack with predictable feature additions per tier; AI as separate tier rather than add-on.
Value ladder: Full four-rung Value Ladder with Free as front-end (Loom-branded acquisition), per-user team tiers as subscription core, Enterprise as back-end.
Decoy/anchor: Business + AI tier as anchor; Business as reasonable team choice; Starter as visible-output flywheel.
Payment mechanics: Per-user monthly or annual with annual discount; no usage metering on video count or send volume below tier caps.

Pricing last verified: 2026-05-17