11–17 of 17 posts
It's important to understand that there are a lot of non-monetary costs associated with paying for things, such as entering payment info and deciding whether it's actually worth paying for in the first place.
It is true that making your users pay to try your product is the best way to keep your userbase small. I think that offering a free version and then a pay version with extra features is the only real way to expect users to pay. The problem is what happens when someone else comes along and offers all of your features for free? Google was really smart with Gmail because they started out offering people 2 gig of space,…
I created Stuff To Do (stufftodo.dedasys.com) as something we needed for work, but on my own time, so I decided to experiment with it a bit. I came up with what I thought was a pretty good separation of pay/free versions: the group-enabled version costs money because if you're working in a group, you're probably in a company, and companies have money...
However, it is also a space that's got a lot of people in it, and while I think I have a few compelling features (the time tracker is the easiest out there) free is tough to beat.
Not sure what I'll do with it, because it's not really the sort of application that lends itself well to advertising (I'd find it pretty annoying to have ads on my todo list).
It's important to understand that there are a lot of non-monetary costs associated with paying for things, such as entering payment info and deciding whether it's actually worth paying for in the first place.
It's important to understand that there are a lot of non-monetary costs associated with paying for things, such as entering payment info and deciding whether it's actually worth paying for in the first place.
agreed, clearly the discontinuity in the demand is based on the non-price costs, which is why people like the idea of easy micropayments so much. But the psychological difference between free and not-free is pretty significant.
On the other hand, I regularly send text messages on my phone without much though given to the crazy $0.15 per-message fee.
It is true that making your users pay to try your product is the best way to keep your userbase small. I think that offering a free version and then a pay version with extra features is the only real way to expect users to pay. The problem is what happens when someone else comes along and offers all of your features for free? Google was really smart with Gmail because they started out offering people 2 gig of space,…
Multiply the increase by the amount of users that receive it and the number doesn't seem so small - and can never be considered 'no cost'. The trade off is that with the more mail they can index per user, the more relevant advertisements they can display and the more people they can lure with their gimmick. Of course, they're also taking advantage of the 10% rule when it comes to offering that large amount of storage.
It is true that making your users pay to try your product is the best way to keep your userbase small. I think that offering a free version and then a pay version with extra features is the only real way to expect users to pay. The problem is what happens when someone else comes along and offers all of your features for free? Google was really smart with Gmail because they started out offering people 2 gig of space,…
"But if you actually watch that ticker it's increasing so slowly that it probably isn't costing them any more money" Multiply the increase by the amount of users that receive it and the number doesn't seem so small - and can never be considered 'no cost'. The trade off is that with the more mail they can index per user, the more relevant advertisements they can display and the more people they can lure with their gim…