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Name one free, popular, profitable, large scale service that offers limited capacity on their offering. Very very few. You offer unlimited and you charge for

Name one free, popular, profitable, large scale service that offers limited capacity on their offering. Very very few. You offer unlimited and you charge for increased value or you monetize with ads. Freemium is mostly dead.

applecrazy 9y ago
Google doesn't offer unlimited data storage. 15GB to start and more can be purchased.
- lostlogin 9y ago
  The storage offering was way way less than that when everyone here signed up, though it was still vastly greater than anything anyone else offered if memory serves.
  - late2part 9y ago
    Agreed. I sort of figure that increase is due to bandwidth inflation and decreasing unit costs.
  - pferde 9y ago
    Vastly indeed. There were even (one or two) pseudo-filesystems which used a Gmail account as a backend, because, hey, a free gigabyte! I vaguely remember Google had to put their foot down to disallow such use, that's how popular those filesystems became. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GmailFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GmailFS
- late2part 9y ago
  You're right. And my reponse is weak. But.... That's really meant to discourage those "power" users (like me) from abusing and leaving big stuff in there, I think. It's not meant to encourage most people to pay.
aaron_m04 9y ago
I thought freemium _was_ charging for increased value.
- rhamzeh 9y ago
  I think the freemium model discussed here is severely limiting your product and it's value for non-paying customers in order to get them to pay up. One of the most powerful advantages of Gmail vs the competition is it's superbly powerful spam filtering and search features - I doubt it's worth losing that powerful image in order to get a few more users to pay up. Just like the biggest advantage and product feature ProtonMail has is privacy and encryption - it would be a bad product decision to remove encryption from all free customers in order to get them to pay up. The alternative is to offer a fully functional free* model that focuses on your strength, and charge customers for extra - extremely useful and important, but non product essential - features. * Some would argue that Google's model is not free, as you are paying for it with your data, but that is a different discussion and outside the scope here.

applecrazy 9y ago

Google doesn't offer unlimited data storage. 15GB to start and more can be purchased.

lostlogin 9y ago
The storage offering was way way less than that when everyone here signed up, though it was still vastly greater than anything anyone else offered if memory serves.
- late2part 9y ago
  Agreed. I sort of figure that increase is due to bandwidth inflation and decreasing unit costs.
- pferde 9y ago
  Vastly indeed. There were even (one or two) pseudo-filesystems which used a Gmail account as a backend, because, hey, a free gigabyte! I vaguely remember Google had to put their foot down to disallow such use, that's how popular those filesystems became. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GmailFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GmailFS
late2part 9y ago
You're right. And my reponse is weak. But.... That's really meant to discourage those "power" users (like me) from abusing and leaving big stuff in there, I think. It's not meant to encourage most people to pay.

aaron_m04 9y ago

I thought freemium _was_ charging for increased value.

rhamzeh 9y ago
I think the freemium model discussed here is severely limiting your product and it's value for non-paying customers in order to get them to pay up. One of the most powerful advantages of Gmail vs the competition is it's superbly powerful spam filtering and search features - I doubt it's worth losing that powerful image in order to get a few more users to pay up. Just like the biggest advantage and product feature ProtonMail has is privacy and encryption - it would be a bad product decision to remove encryption from all free customers in order to get them to pay up. The alternative is to offer a fully functional free* model that focuses on your strength, and charge customers for extra - extremely useful and important, but non product essential - features. * Some would argue that Google's model is not free, as you are paying for it with your data, but that is a different discussion and outside the scope here.