If there is a foothold for freemium, it’s the corporate market where customers are willing to pay for high-quality services as well as customer support. This is

If there is a foothold for freemium, it’s the corporate market where customers are willing to pay for high-quality services as well as customer support. This is why companies such as 37Signals and Freshbooks have thrived because enough customers want more than freemium services. Which means "yes, it is a business model." The key to Freemium is the same key to crippleware: give away enough that a user can experience enough of the product to acknowledge its value. Keep enough back that you can charge for it. That balance is hard, but not impossible. The strange thing that I've found over the years is that the balance requires creativity to pull off. Using a magic number (>1000 accts, >100 friends, >2G of space) is a mark of being lazy. The question whether you can offer substantially new abilities to the customer. Something that makes the product different in a way that isn't a simple extrapolation of what it already does.