Price and Pricing

Value
Price
Pricing is the process by which companies set what they charge in exchange for goods and services.

Another reason price and value tend to diverge: price is a number visible to the eye, while value is invisible; information is asymmetric among market participants (their information doesn't match up); and human biases like the bandwagon effect -- when some choice is trendy in the market, participants pile onto it -- produce short-term mismatches between price and value.


B2B
B2C
B2B2C

Once the perception of "free" drops anchor, it's hard to pull it back up.
If your product has to be given away for free just to get people to use it, chances are the product isn't ready for market yet.
Strategically offering a "free tier/plan" is a different-order matter from giving things away for free. Freemium is a strategic choice: you're boldly giving up early revenue in exchange for high usage and retention, taking on big venture-capital funding, and then aggressively driving sales and marketing to make revenue later. Usually in a Freemium model, users have to pay once they exceed a certain usage or in order to access additional premium features. In that respect, it's a genuinely different-order thing from providing something for free.