How Denis Golubovskyi built Stape’s growth on open source, free tools, and free support.
I kid you not, I signed up for Denis Golubovskyi‘s product right in the middle of our interview.
I test a lot of products, and most of them make it hard for me to care. His does exactly the opposite.
Denis is the co-founder and CEO of Stape, a server-side tracking platform. About forty minutes into our interview, I realized I could go in and set up the exact thing that we were discussing, for free, so I did.
Stape has many open-source tools, publishes full self-hosting guides that walk you through the work without paying a cent, and runs free tools that it earns nothing on. And by doing this it now has more than 200,000 customers across 150+ countries.
In all honesty, every founder instinct says that this approach is how you go broke, but it works for Stape – and it works well.
I recognized the play right away, because I built my own audience the same way. Free education and organic SEO is how I grew to more than 750,000 followers on social media and over a million organic readers on the blog, with no ad spend. So when Denis walked me through how Stape grows, I recognized a better resourced version of the same approach that I have used myself.
If you sell something technical, I want to walk you through why giving it away for free is actually the most disciplined play at hand. And hang tight, because the logic underneath what you’re about to see is one of the cleanest product-led funnels that I’ve deconstructed in awhile – and you can borrow the mechanism.
The winning move that looks like a mistake
Stape was born just as the industry was shifting toward server-side tracking. Google had recently released server-side tagging, the documentation was thin. Denis, a backend engineer with 15 years of experience and a prior run as a startup CTO, figured out how to run it before most of the internet did. He and his co-founder, who ran a marketing agency, built a one-click button that set the whole thing up for you, even if you knew nothing about servers.
They went from idea to first release in two months. A real product took five months. They had three thousand customers in the first year.
Then they made a decision that frankly, looks reckless on paper. While Denis wrote code, his co-founder wrote blog posts that explained the new tracking technology, and they built free tools and templates, and shared open guides so people could get started easily, complete with free guides and full templates. Today they even run free Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for Google Tag Manager, Google Ads, and MCP for Google Analytics that tens of thousands of people use. Stape earns nothing directly on them.
While a founder’s gut might say that move looks reckless, Denis turned it into one of the smartest lead qualification motions you can build.
Why giving it away for free is the whole funnel
Stape sells to marketers and agencies, and that ICP designation is the reason this motion works. That’s because, while most marketers can technically self-host server-side tracking with the open-source version, almost none ever want to. Server setup isn’t their zone of genius, and it isn’t the skill that they were hired for.
So the free version puts the real product in the buyer’s hands, lets them feel exactly what the product does and solves. Then, as their needs and appetite grow, Stape offers a range of paid solutions that put the setup on the next level.
Because most people value convenience, they pay for it without needing to be “sold to”.
The speed of the setup itself removes the friction that usually stops people from acting. For instance, you can set up a Facebook Conversion API integration in about five minutes, and Denis has a YouTube video that shows it done in one, just to prove how fast it goes.
The free layer works as a qualification system. Buyers pre-sort themselves by willingness and skill, so the paid motion only ever touches people who have already decided that they want the outcome.
Support doubles as the content team
The sharpest part of the whole model is the support desk. Of Stape’s 110+ employees, roughly a third work in support and content, and Stape runs them as a single team.
When a customer asks support something and there’s no blog post that answers it, the person who couldn’t find the answer writes a blog post on that topic. That one rule runs most of their content operation. Every gap in understanding becomes published education. Because Stape was early to server-side tracking, that educational blog post almost always landed on the first page of Google. After about twenty posts, the inbound momentum was inevitable.
While making free education your primary growth channel means you pay a lot up front for a slow start, that type of growth compounds quickly once it takes off. It was, of course, helpful that Stape committed to this play earlier than almost anyone in the category.
Denis made one more counterintuitive call. While the rest of the industry races to hand their support function off to AI, Stape deliberately keeps humans running things. His reasoning is that most of his customers don’t fully understand what the product actually does, so they need to talk to a real person who does. Then, those support conversations become content. Each ticket turns into the next article that ranks, and that article brings the next wave of free-tool signups, which feed the two-month conversion cycle. It’s a flywheel that most startups can’t touch.
It works as a loop, and each stage funds the next.
The current bottleneck
The give-it-away model doesn’t solve everything, and Denis said so himself. The hardest part isn’t getting people in – it’s that server-side tracking is technical, and not everyone knows exactly what to do once they’ve signed up. The marketing works. The leads keep coming. The breakdown happens after signup, because plenty of people register and then never finish the setup, and some buyers hit that wall and stop.
The freemium version of the product, the guides, the free tools, the human support, and the “install for me” button all exist for the sole purpose of decreasing the time between sign-up and the aha-moment.
While the give-it-away strategy is Stape’s answer to the activation problem, it’s still a work in progress. So, for you dear reader, I recommend copying the parts that already work for Stape and then observing the impact on product activation.
Reproduce this win
If you sell something technical, run the four-part loop that Denis built… I’ve stripped it down below so you can copy it more easily:
- Give away the thing that your buyer could do alone but won’t. Open-source or free-tier the part that requires a skill that your buyer doesn’t have and doesn’t want. It becomes your best lead magnet because it’s the actual product.
- Turn every unanswered question into published education. Fuse support and content into one team. When a ticket has no article, the person who fielded it writes one. Early in a popular category, that content ranks fast and compounds.
- Place one paid option at the exact point where the friction is the highest. Don’t scatter upsells. Place a single, obvious paid option at the exact moment self-service gets hard. Buyers who value convenience will convert.
- Let the free layer qualify demand so sales stays lean. When your free tier pre-sorts buyers by willingness and skill, your paid motion only touches people who already want the outcome. That’s how Stape keeps 90% of customers self-serve while still landing names like Bugatti, Lucid, Universal Studios, and Decathlon.
Go measure what broken tracking is costing you today
Denis had one ask, and it’s the most on-brand CTA that I could give you… just go try Stape out for yourself. Stape has a free tracking checker that shows you how much ad spend you’re likely losing to broken tracking right now. Run it against your own site. If that number is high enough to bother you, you’ll understand in about ninety seconds why 200,000 people started with the free version and then converted to paid.
P.S. The fact that Denis started by giving people the instruction manual for achieving the transformation themselves maps to something that I tell almost every founder I work with. Your expertise isn’t the moat that you think it is. Hoarding it rarely protects anything. The startups that give the knowledge away and then engineer one clean path from “I get it now” to “do it for me,” are the ones that tend to wake up with 200,000 customers and wonder how it happened.
