Forgive me, but that's fundamentally intellectually dishonest – if you make an argument with completely fictitious numbers and know its seriously flawed but sti

Forgive me, but that's fundamentally intellectually dishonest – if you make an argument with completely fictitious numbers and know its seriously flawed but still put it forward as if it's genuine, you're simply lying to support your argument. If you have real numbers, use them. If you don't, this all sounds a lot like the sort of "numerical" support for anti-piracy measures made by record companies. The interconnection between the marketing role of a free option and its numerical effect on sales is going to be highly nuanced. Further, there are clear-cut reasons that "Big customer databases" are valuable even if "they’re [not all] ponying up cash." The first, discussed elsewhere here, are network effects. Dropbox gets more and more valuable for paying users every time a free user signs up because it makes it all the more likely that the next person they need to share a file with will be able to easily handle a DB share. Second, building a big user-base of devoted users, even if a large percentage are free users, potential builds a barrier to entry for any possible competitors – thus protecting the revenue from the existing paid users and encouraging future paid users. Still, I believe that underlying your whole post is the important point that you must have a solid business plan and understand just how you are going to drive profits – be it freemium or otherwise and that's a very important point, so thank you for calling it out.