I am not suggesting exactly that, no. But it is possible to make large amounts of money without being paid by the people using your service, if there is a ridic

I am not suggesting exactly that, no. But it is possible to make large amounts of money without being paid by the people using your service, if there is a ridiculously large amount of those people. Google is the best example, that part is true. To be more concrete, there are at least two possible ways for something like Dropbox to make money without users paying Dropbox directly: * Data mine the files hosted for users. Even anonymized data like this can be very valuable for third parties. Edit: or for other separate services inside your own company. * Ads that become an integral part of the Dropbox service, preferably targeted using data mining from the previous point. Are these good ideas? I don't know.