Give a 100 monkeys a hundred computers and 15 minutes and they’ll give you a miss-the-point blog post with many stupid comments.

Totally agree – much better to have a smaller number of paying customers, than a huge amount of free users. There’s a lot of merit in taking on a small niche instead of trying to be the next Google/Twitter/etc.

I think Perch is a brilliant idea. Have you thought about offering a monthly or yearly subscription? Something really premium? I bet a lot of design shops would pay $99/mo for some sort of super-Perch account.

We made 50% of our revenue from DropSend’s ‘Business’ account – and that was recurring revenue.

They provide stuff for free, but is it really free when you have to put up with ads, spam, etc…

Plus they are so dominant in certain areas that many people feel uncomfortable about it.

Paid models allow that extra bit of customer service. When was the last time you got rawking service from a free model? It’s only when you start paying that the majority of companeis start really paying attention to you.

Most of us don’t want millions of users. I’d prefer to have hundreds or small thousands with each paying reasonable amounts which would allow me to give them a rawking service.

I’d opt for the 1,000 True Fans model any day – http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php

Like lunch, someone has to pay for it. If a business is backed by someones money and is delivered free to the end user, that business is not free. It may be free at the point of supply, that doesn’t make it free.

I don’t know about the rest of you but I need to earn money to eat and live. If I spend my time developing software, then as a business it has to generate revenue.

Otherwise it’s not a business – it’s a hobby.

There are some considerations to go with that, of course. You have to be charging a fair price for the benefits the product or service offers, but again, this is business as usual.

It’s something we thought about a lot when we launched Perch (a small CMS product – http://grabaperch.com ). There have been cries that it should be free and that it should be open source, but from our point of view it was quite simple.

If we charge a fair price, we can afford to build it and put the product on the market. If we don’t charge, there’s no business there, so there’s no point expending any energy. We weren’t interested in a service business around a free product – that’s not what we do, we’re web developers.

So we pitched it at a price that was designed to be less than a designer’s hourly rate (it’s £35 – around $57 US) figuring that if someone can’t afford that, then in the crudest sense there’s no money to be made form them.

Personally, I expend lots of energy doing things for the common good, providing free stuff and sharing knowledge where I can. When it comes to earning a living, you have to earn a living. You do stuff that people are happy to pay for, and you charge them a fair amount for it. There’s no shame in that – in fact quite the opposite. You work hard, you get paid.