Don't Be A Free User

To partly rebut what maciej is saying here, I'd point out that Backblaze is a very successful not-free service which was also courting purchase offers; paying for a service is no guarantee that you'll get to rely on that service forever, which is a major failing of web-based services in general (and a frequently-mentioned point from my clients when I suggest using some web-based service or another).

But I mostly agree with him anyway.

I paid for and love pinboard. I will probably start paying for his page archival service within the next month. I'm more comfortable with it not only because of his track record so far, but because I know I am his customer. If it were a free service, I'd be far more concerned about how many concessions he'd be willing to make for his real customers -- advertisers or metrics companies or who-knows.

The issue of BigCo's closing useful small services just to harvest the developers post acquisition is certainly a valid one that's worthy of debate.

However, the premise that this only happens because the startup in question was "free" doesn't hold weight. Call me a cynic but the recommendation to use "paid-for" services only to avoid this outcome just seems a little too self-serving to paid-for-only service PinBoard (as excellent as it is).

I don't have an exhaustive list of startup acquisitions that were then shut down, but here's a few just from a Google acquisition list I found:

* PostRank was a paid-for blog data service Google acquired, shut down

* Jambool was a virtual gold payment processing system Google acquired, shut down

* Gizmo5 was a VOIP service Google acquired and shut down.

In some cases even if a company is taking money that alone still doesn't make it viable. In other cases, like PostRank and Jambool where the $$$ being paid by customers was probably significant, acquirers like Google have other circumstances where they'll shut a profitable businesses for a 'higher goal' in a bigger project.

As someone that runs a paid service, I can tell you it's awesome to interact with customers. There's an air of respect that you don't get from completely open products.

let me summarize the main idea for you: A bunch of people pay me because I store their a few hundreds lines of text, save their ass from the sites full of annoying ads like cjb.net or freeservers.com.

no need for the user friendly, smart business models. no need to develop a new vision. this is the hack.

While I agree with the reasoning, I don't like the point being made here. A better one would be to say: be prepared for a possible shutdown of the service you're using if it's free. That means, make sure you can easily take your data out and that you're not too much dependant on it.