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It is true that making your users pay to try your product is the best way to keep your userbase small. I think that offering a free version and then a pay versi

It is true that making your users pay to try your product is the best way to keep your userbase small. I think that offering a free version and then a pay version with extra features is the only real way to expect users to pay. The problem is what happens when someone else comes along and offers all of your features for free? Google was really smart with Gmail because they started out offering people 2 gig of space, which seemed insane. What was even better is that they then made it constantly 'increase' so it seems like you have as much space as you'll ever need. But if you actually watch that ticker it's increasing so slowly that it probably isn't costing them any more money, and in fact their cost probably goes down, to give each user that much space.I guess my point is that once you have a user offering them a better 'precieved' value, even if it's not better than someone else, will get them to stick with you, or get them to consider a pay account.

davidw 20y ago
"The problem is what happens when someone else comes along and offers all of your features for free?" I created Stuff To Do (stufftodo.dedasys.com) as something we needed for work, but on my own time, so I decided to experiment with it a bit. I came up with what I thought was a pretty good separation of pay/free versions: the group-enabled version costs money because if you're working in a group, you're probably in a company, and companies have money... However, it is also a space that's got a lot of people in it, and while I think I have a few compelling features (the time tracker is the easiest out there) free is tough to beat. Not sure what I'll do with it, because it's not really the sort of application that lends itself well to advertising (I'd find it pretty annoying to have ads on my todo list).
semigeek 20y ago
"But if you actually watch that ticker it's increasing so slowly that it probably isn't costing them any more money" Multiply the increase by the amount of users that receive it and the number doesn't seem so small - and can never be considered 'no cost'. The trade off is that with the more mail they can index per user, the more relevant advertisements they can display and the more people they can lure with their gimmick. Of course, they're also taking advantage of the 10% rule when it comes to offering that large amount of storage.
- Readmore 20y ago
  Agreed. Storing more email helps to target their ads, and most users will never use the full amount of space. Also, at the rate that storage gets cheaper they are able to continually increase the limits. It's like the problem that Amazon had with excess servers, they had so much infrastructure that they needed something else to do with it, to fix the problem they started the EC2 and S3 programs. Gmail could serve the same kind of purpose for Google.

davidw 20y ago

"The problem is what happens when someone else comes along and offers all of your features for free?" I created Stuff To Do (stufftodo.dedasys.com) as something we needed for work, but on my own time, so I decided to experiment with it a bit. I came up with what I thought was a pretty good separation of pay/free versions: the group-enabled version costs money because if you're working in a group, you're probably in a company, and companies have money... However, it is also a space that's got a lot of people in it, and while I think I have a few compelling features (the time tracker is the easiest out there) free is tough to beat. Not sure what I'll do with it, because it's not really the sort of application that lends itself well to advertising (I'd find it pretty annoying to have ads on my todo list).

semigeek 20y ago

"But if you actually watch that ticker it's increasing so slowly that it probably isn't costing them any more money" Multiply the increase by the amount of users that receive it and the number doesn't seem so small - and can never be considered 'no cost'. The trade off is that with the more mail they can index per user, the more relevant advertisements they can display and the more people they can lure with their gimmick. Of course, they're also taking advantage of the 10% rule when it comes to offering that large amount of storage.

Readmore 20y ago
Agreed. Storing more email helps to target their ads, and most users will never use the full amount of space. Also, at the rate that storage gets cheaper they are able to continually increase the limits. It's like the problem that Amazon had with excess servers, they had so much infrastructure that they needed something else to do with it, to fix the problem they started the EC2 and S3 programs. Gmail could serve the same kind of purpose for Google.