Each time a message is sent, our servers need to determine whether or not the chatroom is paused. If your chatroom is on the free tier, that’s an easy “no, it’s not paused, continue dealing with the message.” If it’s paid, we have to check whether the chatroom is paused or not, and also check if your rank allows you to speak regardless of pause status.
We continue to optimize our services, so much so that we’ve even increased our user limits on some of our tiers in recent years, and brought features that were on higher tiers down to lower tiers (see this, this and this )
If we instead focused on bringing paid features to the free tier, rather than improve the paid tiers, that wouldn’t be benefiting the customers who pay us monthly or annually. That’s not fair to them — especially since we don’t run ads & don’t sell user data, so our company cannot function on the free tier alone.
In the current era, where prices continue to increase and customers are being squeezed tighter and tighter, I think it’s important for Minnit to continue improving the platform for existing and future customers, and continue to work to give them a better deal. The free tier is certainly important, because we want Minnit to be accessible to people who don’t have anything to pay — but I hope you understand why we can’t bring every feature to every tier.