Ungated Freemium

Fillvisa is "free forever". You can use the software for free, no email required, and it runs completely on your browser (no data saved). For lawyers and legal professionals, we have a paid version - Fillvisa Plus. This framework is called "ungated freemium".

Freemium usually comes with strings attached. You get a tiny slice of the product, then hit a wall. Export blocked. Pages watermarked. Key features locked behind “Upgrade Now.” It’s a pattern everyone recognizes, and everyone resents. Fillvisa takes a different approach: ungated freemium.

Ungated means the free version isn’t a demo. It’s the full experience of filling a USCIS form and generating the official PDF, with nothing held back. No login, no credit card, no countdown where suddenly the product stops working. If you just need to fill a form for yourself, you can use Fillvisa forever without paying a cent.

This model works because the free product isn’t bait. It’s the foundation. It solves a real problem well, and it stands on its own. Fillvisa Plus builds on top of that foundation, but the free tier remains complete and uncompromised. Ungated freemium is a philosophy that says: give people value first, without pressure or tricks. If the product is good, the right users will naturally choose to pay for more.

Immigrants Are Underserved

When you look at the landscape of immigration tools for regular people, a pretty clear pattern appears: immigrants are either left to fend for themselves with broken PDFs, or pushed toward expensive paid services. There’s almost nothing in the middle.

Most individuals filling out their own forms end up juggling a mix of Adobe, random PDF editors, YouTube tutorials, and Reddit threads. The tools aren’t built for them. They’re built around the PDF, not around the person. And because of that, people end up stressed, confused, and often worried about whether they filled everything correctly.

The alternative is paying for services like Boundless, CitizenPath, or SimpleCitizen. They can be helpful, but they’re priced for a very different audience. These platforms routinely charge hundreds of dollars to guide users through forms that the government provides for free. For many immigrants, that’s simply out of reach. Others end up paying because they don’t trust the tools available to them, not because they actually wanted a paid service.

This is the gap Fillvisa fills. A modern, accurate, safe way to complete a form without paying a fee or creating an account. The free experience isn’t a stripped-down version of something better. It is the product. It respects the fact that most immigrants aren’t looking for a “service.” They just need a reliable tool that works.

Consumers = Free, Professionals = Paid

Most immigration software tries to charge everyone. If you’re a family filling out a single form, you pay. If you’re a lawyer completing hundreds of forms a year, you also pay. Fillvisa splits these worlds intentionally.

For consumers, immigration paperwork is already stressful and expensive. Charging individuals for the simple act of filling a government form feels unnecessary. So the consumer experience stays free: fill your form, download your official PDF, and move on. No account, no subscription, no cost.

Professionals, on the other hand, have different needs. Firms need collaboration, client portals, encrypted storage, version control, intake flows, and the ability to import PDFs at scale. These are workflow tools, not personal conveniences. They create real productivity gains inside a practice, and that value justifies pricing.

So the model is clean: individuals shoulder zero cost, and professionals pay for features that run their business better. No tricks. No overlap. Two different audiences, two different outcomes, two different price expectations.

Related post: Why Fillvisa is Free Forever

Most legal tech tools are bloated, expensive, and ugly

Talk to any immigration lawyer and you’ll hear the same complaints. The software they rely on every day is overloaded with features they never use, missing the ones they actually need, and wrapped in an interface that looks like it was designed in a previous decade. And despite all that, it’s still expensive.

Large legal tech platforms try to be everything for everyone. The result is clutter: fifteen tabs, dozens of settings, complex permission systems, and dashboards that feel more like cockpit panels than tools for humans. These systems do get the job done, but they make you work around their complexity. The price usually reflects that complexity too, with monthly subscriptions climbing into the hundreds.

This bloated model exists because these platforms grow by adding features, not by improving the fundamentals. When a product is built for sales demos instead of everyday workflow, it becomes heavy. When it’s built under VC pressure, it becomes pricey. And when it’s built without taste, it becomes ugly.

Fillvisa Plus intentionally does the opposite. Clean, simple, narrow, and focused. No feature soup. No excess. No “enterprise-grade complexity” for the sake of optics. Just tools that work and stay out of the way.

Lean, beautiful, focused

There’s a belief in tech that more features equal more value. Add dashboards. Add workflows. Add templates. Add AI summaries. Add ten different permission layers. Eventually the product becomes a maze, and the original purpose gets buried under a pile of “nice to have” ideas.

Fillvisa Plus takes the opposite approach. It avoids complexity on purpose. The goal is not to build the most feature-rich platform - it’s to build the most usable one. Every screen should feel calm. Every control should feel obvious. Every workflow should feel intuitive.

This clarity only happens when you’re willing to say no. No to features that look impressive but don’t improve daily work. No to clutter that slows people down. No to bells and whistles added just to keep up with competitor checklists.

A lean product isn’t a limited product. It’s a respectful one. It values the lawyer’s time. It values their attention. And it values the idea that craftsmanship matters. Beautiful software is not a luxury. In high-stress fields like immigration law, it’s a relief.

Indie business, backed by customers, not VC

Fillvisa isn’t built inside a venture-funded treadmill. There are no investor expectations, no growth-at-all-costs targets, and no pressure to turn every interaction into revenue. That changes everything about how the product is shaped.

When you build with VC money, you’re building for scale first and users second. You’re incentivized to add features that impress buyers, not features that make daily work easier. You chase expansion, integrations, and enterprise deals. You end up building for checkwriters instead of caseworkers.

An indie business operates differently. Survival depends on customers, not pitch decks. Revenue comes from delivering value, not promises. Every paid feature in Fillvisa Plus has to earn its place by actually making lawyers’ lives easier. And the free product stays free because its purpose isn’t to convert every user - it’s to help people and spread through communities organically.

Indie means patient. Indie means honest. Indie means no hidden agendas around data or pricing. It gives the product room to stay small where it should be small, and strong where it needs to be strong.

How Free helps us in distribution

Most legal tech companies rely on paid acquisition. Ads, cold outreach, conferences, partner programs, sales teams. All of that adds cost, and that cost gets baked into the price lawyers pay. Fillvisa grows differently.

Free gives us natural distribution. When immigrants use the free tool and love it, they share it with others. When a lawyer receives a perfectly filled PDF from a client who used Fillvisa, they instantly see the value. When community groups, Discord servers, or Reddit threads recommend it, it spreads without a single marketing dollar.

Free reduces friction everywhere. No signup wall means people share the link without hesitation. No subscription means people trust it. And because the free version produces clean, official USCIS PDFs, every download is quietly advertising the tool. Free doesn’t just help users. It helps the product travel.

Instead of spending money to force visibility, Fillvisa earns visibility through usefulness. Distribution becomes a side effect of doing the right thing for the right audience.

How Free and Plus are connected via the Import PDF feature

The most natural bridge between Fillvisa Free and Fillvisa Plus is the Import PDF feature. It turns a simple free tool into a powerful workflow upgrade for professionals, without changing what the free users experience.

When an immigrant fills a form using Fillvisa Free and sends the PDF to their lawyer, that PDF becomes a clean, structured input. Instead of retyping every answer into their case management system, the lawyer can import the PDF directly into Fillvisa Plus and instantly generate a full client intake. No manual entry. No transcription errors. No wasted hours.

This creates a quiet, organic connection between both products. Immigrants get a free, safe, ungated tool that improves their experience. Lawyers get a seamless workflow improvement that saves time and reduces mistakes. Free users aren’t upsold. Professionals aren’t forced into a new ecosystem. The link happens naturally through the document they were already going to send.

Pricing is usually treated like a business decision, but for Fillvisa it’s a design decision. Free isn’t bait. Plus isn’t bloat. The structure exists because two very different audiences need two very different things - and the fairest model is the one that respects both.

Immigrants get a tool that removes friction instead of adding more. Lawyers get software that treats their time as the scarce resource it is. And the product grows in a way that doesn’t compromise trust, data, or the experience of the people who rely on it.

Fillvisa doesn’t have to choose between being accessible and being sustainable. With a free foundation and a focused professional tier, it can be both. And that balance is what keeps the mission honest: build something simple, useful, humane, and priced in a way that reflects what people actually need.

If this resonates with you - whether you’re filling one form or managing hundreds - I hope Fillvisa feels like a step toward a better, calmer kind of immigration tech.