6 ms·

Freemium - Shmeemium (or why micro-billing is better)

23 points by hymanroth 17y ago

noodle 17y ago
i don't necessarily disagree, there just needs to be a powerful, useful, efficient, central microbilling service before it actually catches on. i also don't necessarily agree with the assumption that the paid versions are artificially higher. the point of the free version is for the ads to more or less cover the costs.
- hymanroth 17y ago
  The cost of the paid versions are artificially high wrt to the additional benefit they provide and to what they would cost if all the users paid up. As web apps become more prevalent, people will be less willing to giving up their acreage to ads. Agree that microbilling needs critical mass before catching on.
abrahamvegh 17y ago
Excellent article. Freemium is much better for both consumers and producers: Consumers avoid annoying ads, and they get something they don't mind paying for (one reason being that it costs so little). Producers just win all around. :)
- hymanroth 17y ago
  I hope you meant 'micro-billing is much better'....
  - abrahamvegh 17y ago
    To a certain extent, yes, I did. Thanks.
olefoo 17y ago
One aspect of freemium models that you are giving seriously short shrift to is that they often have an element of value exchange to them. Additional users free or pro, make the service as a whole more valuable, if the cost of subsidizing a freegan is less than the value they contribute, it's a perfectly rational exchange. This is why craigslist, flickr and myspace were able to sustain that model, the marginal cost of an additional user is usually much less than the utility they provide to the rest of the users. And that isn't even considering the value of peer production, from mutual support to people building tools within the ecosystem that is hosting them. In your spreadsheet example, the use who posts a widely used rent/own evaluation worksheet is still charged when she uses the site, even though you should be compensating her for the value she adds to the site. While I like the idea of microbilling, I think it's somewhat orthogonal to freemium models.
- hymanroth 17y ago
  Good point. But not every web service benefits from the network effect. The spreadsheet example was not chosen at random. As long as you can save you spreadsheet in a common format, would you really choose a service with a higher user base over one that offered much better functionality but with fewer users? There is space for both models. But for web applications I think microbilling has significant advantages
talleyrand 17y ago
Isn't the model this article describes exactly what Amazon does with AWS?
- hymanroth 17y ago
  Yup. The trick is to get consumers to embrace it.
- davidmathers 17y ago
  Isn't the model this article describes exactly what Amazon does with AWS? Metered usage is not the same thing as micropayments. I may have skimmed the OP too quickly, but if metered usage was the proposal then the title is misleading. The use case for metered billing is rapid scaling in the face of unpredictable usage patterns.
LeBleu 17y ago
In implying the penny gap can be eliminated, this article fails to account for mental transaction costs. No matter how simple a microbilling service is, there is still a mental transaction cost for deciding whether to pay or not. If my time is worth $20/hour (US average wage), and it takes me 3 seconds to read your microbilling screen and understand what you are charging, it has already cost me a penny. 3 seconds is enough time for the average reader to read 5 words. I would estimate you have about a minute to explain your service and charge for it, if you want the customer to spend a quarter on something that is worth fifty cents (or more) to them. (See http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment#Theory.2Fcriticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment#Theory.2Fcriticism for more background on mental transaction costs.) If the price of your freemium service is artificially high, then you are doing it wrong. The freemium model is for services where the price of supporting free users is less than the price of other ways of informing your paying customers that you exist. (Including cases where free users contribute value.) The best way to structure the freemium model is such that you only charge for things that are natural scarcities, not things that can be freely replicated. For example, charging for support (human time to solve your problem) is better than charging for features. (Existing features aren't scarce, it costs nothing to roll them out to all users. Implementing new features is scarce.)
- hymanroth 17y ago
  The mental transaction cost is certainly an issue with content. I wouldn't want to have to decide every time I start reading a news article whether I want to pay to get to the end. However, the one-off mental cost of deciding whether to allow a web service to bill me for future usage is not a big deal, and, anyway, it applies even more to the choice of upgrading from a free to premium version. In fact, it applies to any instance where the user is faced with having to pay for something. What do you propose? Everything should always be free? As for the scarcity argument, charging for support is a horrible business model. Look at Red Hat's revenues per user vs MSFT's. The key is to leverage the negligible marginal distribution costs of digital content.
- davidmathers 17y ago
  In implying the penny gap can be eliminated, this article fails to account for mental transaction costs. Seriously. Clay Shirky explained this 9 years ago: http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/micropayments.html http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/micropayments.ht... I can't believe someone is writing this in 2009. There's so much wrong with it I don't even know where to begin, but this paragraph stuck me as particularly wrong: "Fair enough. But here’s one thing freemium fans can’t deny: in their model, a tiny minority of paid users subsidizes the service for everybody. It is this simple fact that makes the freemium model self-defeating, because, for the numbers to work, the price of the paid service must be set artificially high." That's just pure mental confusion and abuse of language by the author. Try this thought experiment: github launched as a micropayment service. It would already be dead. How do you calculate the "fair" price of something that doesn't exist?
Banzai10 17y ago
Actually, the ads often help to keep the price of freemium not as high as was mentioned in the article. Also the Micro-Payments are good for sellers because the customer have less control over what he is consuming, because it's a pain in the %$# check every time how is your consume. So having less control over your consume the pop up comes faster :D
netsp 17y ago
I don't understand the logic flow of this article. First it seems to place to place freemium & micro billing in opposition. I don't see why. Then it goes on to describe all sorts of problems that might affect a freemium model. They can be annoying. There's a race to the bottom. There's the penny gap. paid subsidises free. All true. None universally applicable. Certainly none universally deal breakers. To pick on the last one I could give this analogy that applies to many kinds of freemium businesses. Whenever you buy your brand of toothpaste (that you have been buying for 20 years) you are subsidising advertising to new markets in countries you don't care abut. In other cases even that analogy doesn't hold because free customers do not raise costs. When finally getting back to microbilling, the solution appears to be some sort of universal easy micro billing service & a cultural shift away from subscriptions towards pay-as-you-go. Fine. Good. Works for iphone apps & mobile phone trivia, why not web apps? What relevance does this have for business models that rely on freemium? None. No such service exists at this point. The fact that the proposed solution is a universal one, points to the fact that WebApp companies shouldn't roll their own. I agree that micro billing is a good idea. I don't see what it has to do with freemium.
theBobMcCormick 17y ago
I can see the potential for micro-billing in B2B services, but I'm quite certain micro-billing will never be successful in the consumer market. The problem as I see it is that most potential customers will see micro-billing as the very embodiment of "nickle and dimed to death". Which is not very surprising. Usage based billing is seldom ever popular with consumers, who have historically chosen flat-fee options in overwhelming numbers whenever given the choice.
albertsun 17y ago
He just "assumes" the step of a clearinghouse for payment information exists and stores the users payment information. Unfortunately, nothing of the sort exists, and would be quite a big hurdle to get over.

23 points by hymanroth 17y ago

i don't necessarily disagree, there just needs to be a powerful, useful, efficient, central microbilling service before it actually catches on. i also don't necessarily agree with the assumption that the paid versions are artificially higher. the point of the free version is for the ads to more or less cover the costs.

hymanroth 17y ago
The cost of the paid versions are artificially high wrt to the additional benefit they provide and to what they would cost if all the users paid up. As web apps become more prevalent, people will be less willing to giving up their acreage to ads. Agree that microbilling needs critical mass before catching on.

abrahamvegh 17y ago

Excellent article. Freemium is much better for both consumers and producers: Consumers avoid annoying ads, and they get something they don't mind paying for (one reason being that it costs so little). Producers just win all around. :)

hymanroth 17y ago
I hope you meant 'micro-billing is much better'....
- abrahamvegh 17y ago
  To a certain extent, yes, I did. Thanks.

olefoo 17y ago

One aspect of freemium models that you are giving seriously short shrift to is that they often have an element of value exchange to them. Additional users free or pro, make the service as a whole more valuable, if the cost of subsidizing a freegan is less than the value they contribute, it's a perfectly rational exchange. This is why craigslist, flickr and myspace were able to sustain that model, the marginal cost of an additional user is usually much less than the utility they provide to the rest of the users. And that isn't even considering the value of peer production, from mutual support to people building tools within the ecosystem that is hosting them. In your spreadsheet example, the use who posts a widely used rent/own evaluation worksheet is still charged when she uses the site, even though you should be compensating her for the value she adds to the site. While I like the idea of microbilling, I think it's somewhat orthogonal to freemium models.

hymanroth 17y ago
Good point. But not every web service benefits from the network effect. The spreadsheet example was not chosen at random. As long as you can save you spreadsheet in a common format, would you really choose a service with a higher user base over one that offered much better functionality but with fewer users? There is space for both models. But for web applications I think microbilling has significant advantages

talleyrand 17y ago

Isn't the model this article describes exactly what Amazon does with AWS?

hymanroth 17y ago
Yup. The trick is to get consumers to embrace it.
davidmathers 17y ago
Isn't the model this article describes exactly what Amazon does with AWS? Metered usage is not the same thing as micropayments. I may have skimmed the OP too quickly, but if metered usage was the proposal then the title is misleading. The use case for metered billing is rapid scaling in the face of unpredictable usage patterns.

LeBleu 17y ago

In implying the penny gap can be eliminated, this article fails to account for mental transaction costs. No matter how simple a microbilling service is, there is still a mental transaction cost for deciding whether to pay or not. If my time is worth $20/hour (US average wage), and it takes me 3 seconds to read your microbilling screen and understand what you are charging, it has already cost me a penny. 3 seconds is enough time for the average reader to read 5 words. I would estimate you have about a minute to explain your service and charge for it, if you want the customer to spend a quarter on something that is worth fifty cents (or more) to them. (See http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment#Theory.2Fcriticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment#Theory.2Fcriticism for more background on mental transaction costs.) If the price of your freemium service is artificially high, then you are doing it wrong. The freemium model is for services where the price of supporting free users is less than the price of other ways of informing your paying customers that you exist. (Including cases where free users contribute value.) The best way to structure the freemium model is such that you only charge for things that are natural scarcities, not things that can be freely replicated. For example, charging for support (human time to solve your problem) is better than charging for features. (Existing features aren't scarce, it costs nothing to roll them out to all users. Implementing new features is scarce.)

hymanroth 17y ago
The mental transaction cost is certainly an issue with content. I wouldn't want to have to decide every time I start reading a news article whether I want to pay to get to the end. However, the one-off mental cost of deciding whether to allow a web service to bill me for future usage is not a big deal, and, anyway, it applies even more to the choice of upgrading from a free to premium version. In fact, it applies to any instance where the user is faced with having to pay for something. What do you propose? Everything should always be free? As for the scarcity argument, charging for support is a horrible business model. Look at Red Hat's revenues per user vs MSFT's. The key is to leverage the negligible marginal distribution costs of digital content.
davidmathers 17y ago
In implying the penny gap can be eliminated, this article fails to account for mental transaction costs. Seriously. Clay Shirky explained this 9 years ago: http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/micropayments.html http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/micropayments.ht... I can't believe someone is writing this in 2009. There's so much wrong with it I don't even know where to begin, but this paragraph stuck me as particularly wrong: "Fair enough. But here’s one thing freemium fans can’t deny: in their model, a tiny minority of paid users subsidizes the service for everybody. It is this simple fact that makes the freemium model self-defeating, because, for the numbers to work, the price of the paid service must be set artificially high." That's just pure mental confusion and abuse of language by the author. Try this thought experiment: github launched as a micropayment service. It would already be dead. How do you calculate the "fair" price of something that doesn't exist?

Banzai10 17y ago

Actually, the ads often help to keep the price of freemium not as high as was mentioned in the article. Also the Micro-Payments are good for sellers because the customer have less control over what he is consuming, because it's a pain in the %$# check every time how is your consume. So having less control over your consume the pop up comes faster :D

netsp 17y ago

I don't understand the logic flow of this article. First it seems to place to place freemium & micro billing in opposition. I don't see why. Then it goes on to describe all sorts of problems that might affect a freemium model. They can be annoying. There's a race to the bottom. There's the penny gap. paid subsidises free. All true. None universally applicable. Certainly none universally deal breakers. To pick on the last one I could give this analogy that applies to many kinds of freemium businesses. Whenever you buy your brand of toothpaste (that you have been buying for 20 years) you are subsidising advertising to new markets in countries you don't care abut. In other cases even that analogy doesn't hold because free customers do not raise costs. When finally getting back to microbilling, the solution appears to be some sort of universal easy micro billing service & a cultural shift away from subscriptions towards pay-as-you-go. Fine. Good. Works for iphone apps & mobile phone trivia, why not web apps? What relevance does this have for business models that rely on freemium? None. No such service exists at this point. The fact that the proposed solution is a universal one, points to the fact that WebApp companies shouldn't roll their own. I agree that micro billing is a good idea. I don't see what it has to do with freemium.

theBobMcCormick 17y ago

I can see the potential for micro-billing in B2B services, but I'm quite certain micro-billing will never be successful in the consumer market. The problem as I see it is that most potential customers will see micro-billing as the very embodiment of "nickle and dimed to death". Which is not very surprising. Usage based billing is seldom ever popular with consumers, who have historically chosen flat-fee options in overwhelming numbers whenever given the choice.

albertsun 17y ago

He just "assumes" the step of a clearinghouse for payment information exists and stores the users payment information. Unfortunately, nothing of the sort exists, and would be quite a big hurdle to get over.