If you haven’t heard, the URL shortening service Tr.im is closing down. It’s a shame because it was my favorites, and I wasn’t alone. In a busy space, the tr.im product wasn’t particularly unique, but it was easy, clean and offered a couple features that no else did. And it was free.
But all of the url shortening services are free. Some have freemuim models, some, like tr.im, are meant to drive traffic to the company’s other products. Free is a big topic of discussion right now, and a lot of people building web apps struggle with it. What do we give away, and what do we charge for? What will people pay for? How do we make money off of free?
The comments about tr.im closing are an interesting cross section of what the web looks like right now. Many are now offering to pay for it, a few are suggesting it get open-sourced, and a few have posted rediculously low offers to buy. There are two things that I take away from this.
The first point is that people put a very low value on web services. Suggesting that it get open-sourced misses the point that even tho bandwidth and disk space are very cheap now, they do still cost money. It’s not about the software, it’s what the software does. The same goes for the offensively low offers. When thousands are spent on developing a product, selling for a few thousand, which often will be a drop in the bucket, is worse than not selling at all – on morale, on one’s sense of worth, on the reputation of the company. I would also say it hurts the next web application that tries to sell. Like law, it’s setting a bad precedent.
The second point is the chicken or the egg of pricing on the web. Now that people have tried tr.im and love it, are invested in it and sometimes committed to it, they’re offering to pay for it to not go away. What if tr.im had not been free from the beginning? Even if it had been far superior to the competition and only cost $1.99, I wager that most people would’ve gone anywhere else that was “good enough” and free. What if tr.im had started out free, or offered most of their services for free, but charged for stats or something? Again, I bet most people would’ve gone elsewhere. Finally had they suddenly started charging, as people are asking them to do now, there would’ve been a public outcry. People would’ve been furious. But because it’s now all or nothing, people are offering. It’s a catch-22.
Don’t get me wrong, I love free services on the web, but people need to realize that time and thinking and software and bandwidth and CPU cycles are not free. We’re paying for most “free” services one way or another anyway – ads, promotion, whatever. Let’s get rid of the taboo about charging outright for a decent service, and let’s be willing to pay a few bucks for someone’s hard work and thought. I look forward to the “free” web being over.
Tags: chris anderson, free web sites, monetizing, saas, tr.im, url shortening, web apps
