I’m in the middle of reading Chris Anderson’s Book, “FREE” and how the free economy has been around for a very long time but has radically changed since the Internet has become a part of our daily lives. There are many things that I use online that are free but many that aren’t. If there’s a premium model of a service where you get extra features for more money, I’ll weigh out the features and look into if I’ll actually use them and will usually upgrade for a primary reason. Reliability.
I want to know that a product or service is reliable which is why most people will get a certain brand of car or shop at Gap instead of Old Navy. It’s a common trait of ours to pay a dollar more for something that is significantly better than the cheaper or free product. The Internet is no different and I pay for nearly everything I use online. It gets expensive but my experience is richer, more stable, more secure and overall more reliable.
Just recently, Gmail was down for most of an entire day. This was not the first time the big G was down not just for Gmail.com users but also users of Google Apps which is Google’s business targeted email & collaboration suite. Google Apps has a free plan but for $50 per user per year, there’s a premium model with a ton of excellent features. What stood out to me is 24/7 phone support & 99.99% uptime guaranteed. It was a year ago when I was a standard free Google Apps user and the service went down for the last time. That was the last straw. I spent the $50, upgrade my account and haven’t seen downtime since then except for one day when I called and they made a few changes and I was back online. Last week, when Gmail was down, I was fine and had zero email interruption. Of course, since most of the people that email me are on Gmail which meant I didn’t get many messages that day, anyway. Hah.
In my last post about data backup, I uncovered that I’m paying over $350 a year just to keep my data secure, backed up, in sync and accessible across all 4 of my devices. Yes, there are free versions of software and free services that I could use but why would anyone trust their data with a free service? Remember all of those 500 photos you manually scanned in of you as a child and stored on your computer that are not synced to an online backup system? Well don’t cry when your computer is stolen and due to some freak encryption problem, those online backups aren’t recoverable. Instead of paying $15 a year, you chose to be cheap and now those photos are lost forever.
I also have two virtual servers that I pay monthly for. Don’t worry, they’re super cheap and aren’t a huge expense. One is a Linux server used to host my websites, store some random data and host some misc. Services like Yammer (self-hosted) and stuff that’s private. The other server is a Windows server that runs Sharepoint 2007. Sharepoint can be expensive but it’s basically PBworks, BaseCamp, Yammer, PHPBB, Vbulletin, WordPress, Box.net, BuddyPress and Google Calendar all rolled into one site. It takes about a week to fully setup with custom modules but then you’re rolling. Any project I do is setup in Sharepoint and I invite collaborators to work in this environment. It’s backed up, secure and reliable. Sure there’s a single point of failure with all of that data behind one password but I don’t want to trust that any one of those other services are around 5 years from now, nor do I want to pay for all of them separately and finally, I don’t trust the people operating the “free” services and I’d rather host all of it myself on my own box. It’s piece of mind, flexibility, cost-savings and more control. Sharepoint alone costs me about $50 a month but all of the services above paid for separately would cost even more and many charge on a Per-User basis. Sharepoint is up to 500 users for one flat license fee.
The final round of things I pay for is desktop software. Software is important and good software can help you stay organized, optimize your workflow and simply make day to day activities a lot easier. A good user interface, simply usage workflow and solid crash-free app is worth something to me. Freeware is great and I have found wonderful freeway but there is usually something better that comes around and it usually costs money. There’s no shame in paying if you get more features. I go back to my original point though of support & reliability. Paying for something usually means you’ll get a certain level of support from the developer. I’d rather pay and be able to email the developer 1 or 2 times a year than be stuck when some preference file goes corrupt and I’m stuck with a task list that I can’t open.
I don’t believe in paying for something just to remove ads though. Ad-free isn’t a business model that I participate in if that’s your only offering. For example. Every 5 or 10 times I launch Tweetie (a Twitter app for Mac) it gives me this little teaser asking that I purchase it and throughout the day, ads are injected into the application between every 25 tweets. It doesn’t bother me and $20 for an ad-free model just doesn’t appeal.
I didn’t go into every aspect or product that I pay for but the reality is that I pay for things I use online and I get a better product & support because of it. Consider paying next time and you’ll be amazed at the results you get.