Since I spent over a decade working in government and then 3+ years selling into all levels of government at my last SaaS company, I'll provide my initial thoughts here. But there are no easy answers to this question as the 15 days without a response can attest.

Your initial challenge (from the little I see about your solution) is that no RFPs will be coming out for your product since it isn't a common solution a large number of governments are already buying. At my last company, I had this same challenge and I overcame it to sell into over 20 states and 50 local governments in a few years.

Don't start with federal. They won't consider your solution until other governments are using it. I focused on state and local public safety. I did this by attending public safety industry conferences with booths and speaking slots. In other words, I built awareness.

Then I found the public safety employee that has the characteristics of an early adopter. Having customers that can produce case studies and be your telephone reference customer is huge.

I also setup partnerships with established companies that already have business in some of the large governments and states. It is so much easier for a government to find budget to add a service to an existing contract than bring in a completely new company.

Most importantly, I was able to work with states to established master purchasing agreement so local governments in that state didn't have to go out to bid. They could purchase off the state contract. It takes a lot of work for the first state, but when you have an example of one, you can replicate it in other states fairly easily.

I'm available for a call if you want to discuss this more.

Since you are a smaller company, I assume you are not going to invest in a large voice of the customer solution from companies like Qualtrics, Totango, etc. It sounds like you are interested in thinking outside the box and finding something engineers will use. One thing I know is that engineers enjoy interactive reports that provide data behind the story. So my recommendation is to consider www.tableau.com.

As with every anything worthwhile, this isn't something you can buy and finish implementing in a few minutes. But you can connect Tableau to a massive variety of data sources (or build your own using Phyton.) If you want inspiration, visit their gallery of examples.

I can see you putting your chat and twitter results into a word map in Tableau to show what is top of mind for your customers. Regression analysis of your survey results may be very helpful for making decisions about future product dev. I don't work for Tableau but I do have a lot of practical experience implementing it for Customer Success programs. If you want to learn more, I'm happy to discuss on a call.

At my last SaaS company, we offered a free trial for 30 days to enterprise customers with some limited functionality and a freemium app to consumers. We didn't have any problem attracting investors using all three options because our business model showed the value and strategic benefit of each. However, every situation is different so you need to think through all the issues.

The one answer I am confident is that the pay only option is no longer an option. Even the most powerful software and SaaS companies in the world offer free trials.

While you need to consider many aspects of your business model to make this decision, I can offer a high-level opinion based on my experience. First, if your service can show financial benefit from data collected or analysis completed as a result of freemium subscriptions, then you will want to keep those users active even if they are receiving the service for free. But if you can't see any financial benefit from the data generated from the freemium users, then focus on the free trial. Keep in mind, depending on your product, there may still be enough cost savings to show the value of a freemium model.

My second part to this advice is to consider how you will implement customer success for a freemium versus free trial. Both offerings will need a way to help the customer successfully use your product and find the value. If your service is too complicated for someone to use when they have no investment in it, then a freemium doesn't make sense.

If you would like to discuss your specific situation, let's setup a call.