Making Your Users Pay

Just read an inter­est­ing com­ment at Tara Hunt’s blog where some­one wrote about Mov­able­Type and its pay model. I’ve never actu­ally used it since Word­Press is so spot on super per­fect for me, but any­way. These days, mak­ing users pay for web apps may be the begin­ning of an end if you’re not specif­i­cally devel­op­ing for business/corporate/advanced use. On a per­sonal level, there’s not much I would pay for on the inter­net con­sid­er­ing how much great free stuff there is. (Oops.) Of course, things are never black and white. What about the grey areas? If the par­tic­u­lar ser­vice or appli­ca­tion requires heavy server power or a lot of main­te­nance, then that needs to be payed for. If your ser­vice is way bet­ter than any­thing else out there or if you’ve got some­thing com­pletely new and clever, then maybe you want to set a price because you can. You get my point; there are rea­sons. And it makes busi­ness sense to charge for a ser­vice you’ve spent time and some­times money on cre­at­ing but what are your per­sonal beliefs? We need to take those into con­sid­er­a­tion here as well and not sell our­selves out com­pletely. Many peo­ple seem to go for a free ver­sion and a pre­mium ver­sion. That’s the Web 2.0 way of doing things, right? I like it, I really do, because we can encour­age peo­ple to use the appli­ca­tion with­out any cost involved. It’s about pro­vid­ing some­thing of value to some­one. How­ever, mon­e­ti­za­tion is needed to keep the wheel spin­ning and I do under­stand peo­ples finan­cial motives. I’m work­ing on one of those per­sonal projects that keep pil­ing up in my spare time — you know how it is. My idea is to be pro­vide a free ver­sion for per­sonal use, gen­er­ous with fea­tures and specs. It’s impor­tant to keep these users happy and be as use­ful as pos­si­ble to them. While this makes busi­ness sense, my per­sonal beliefs are also that peo­ple shouldn’t have to pay to make their life a lit­tle eas­ier. Within rea­son­able bound­aries. How­ever, there’s the commercial/business/advanced users that for some rea­son need a lit­tle bit more. It makes sense that if these peo­ple need more specs/features than every­one else, they can pay a small (or large) fee. Espe­cially for commercial/business users that actu­ally make money and save time by using the appli­ca­tion. Of course, there are loads of com­pli­ca­tions along the way to the per­fect pay model. Just like in pol­i­tics, there’s a large amount of fac­tors to con­sider. I guess you could say that this is part of the busi­ness pol­i­tics and as usual you can never really sat­isfy every­one. Then again, I’m not a pro­fes­sional in the field just yet so I may not be the worlds most cred­i­ble source. But I believe a good busi­ness model is one that mainly focuses on encour­ag­ing peo­ple to use your app, not pay for it — even though the lat­ter is most often a neces­sity.