■ Generosity as a strategic differentiator

Up: § Buffer thoughts and decisions

One piece of Buffer's strategy is Generosity.

Buffer is founder and team owned and controlled, and this allows us to take a long-term view on the business. It also allows us to build the product we'd love to use and a company we'd love to work for.

How we approach freemium is itself an act of generosity and requires a long-term mindset. Giving part of your product away for free is inherently a generous thing to do, and it means foregoing revenue that you could collect earlier. But for Buffer, freemium is strategic as it is our belief and experience that giving part of our product away for free leads to more overall users of Buffer. This greater volume leads to natural word of mouth marketing and a stronger brand, and also creates a pool of users who reach our free plan limits over time and upgrade. By exercising patience, we gain more paying customers over time as we grow the number of user cohorts on the free plan which contribute new paying customers.

One of my favorite acts of generosity happened in 2025 when we proactively cancelled inactive customers' subscriptions.

Our ability to be generous is directly connected to our ownership structure. We do not have pressure for short term growth and results. We can utilize this advantage to lean further into generosity. It feels great and the right thing to do, but it's also highly strategic. Many of our acts of generosity are decisions that would never enter competitors' minds, and would almost certainly never get board sign-off. These acts of generosity are also very hard to implement early on when revenue is critical to survival, so it also differentiates us from new entrants.

Other related concepts:

• Supporting independence and ownership in social media
• Ownership and Control
• Ownership of Buffer
• ■ The ambition of being small, efficient, and rewarded
• David Kim's post on generosity on the individual level (connection to my own values)
• Amaan VLG meeting
• Justina meeting on DevRel
• Amanda meeting on API strategy
• Another example: pay for active users for collaboration (Brandon strategy meeting 6/9)
• API on the free plan
• Tobi Lutke quote on creating levers and not pulling them