They're not principle. They're at best, guidelines. Things that have worked for some people, but might not work for others. It's also important to realize th

They're not principle. They're at best, guidelines. Things that have worked for some people, but might not work for others. It's also important to realize that completely different approaches have also been successful. Take your example of unfuddle.com for example. Their model seems to be working for them, but it's quite a bit different than the pricing model used by GitHub (as another example), which also seems to be working. Github gives out a heck of a lot more than a taste for free, but have still managed to find a pretty effective approach to market segmentation. I think it's also pretty important that in most cases, the "taste" you give out for free, is a big enough taste to be enough for the customer to want to bother tasting. Otherwise you're not really using a freemium model, and you really aren't offering much more to the customer than you would if you offered them a slick powerpoint and a demo site.