Free is a hard genie to put back in the bottle.
Suddenly software was everywhere, for cheap or free.
If the ancient dream of turning lead to gold became reality, we wouldnt become infinitely richer.
Gold instead would become so abundant itd be just another metal.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
How do you compete with free?
Perhaps you could charge more.
Thats how Sublime Text, Slack, Superhuman, Notion, Pinboard, and many other software businesses won.
Stand out by charging more
When software was scarce, any price made sense.
Of course you would pay.
The software was not only best-in-class, it was often your only choice.
Any app would work.
But inside that free market, a subset of customers are eager to pay more for something better.
Theyll use your product, give feedback, and request changes and new featuresbut would they pay for them?
Charging upfront, instead, focuses your audience on those who need the product enough to pay for it.
When they talk, it pays to listenliterally.
You wouldnt have wanted these folks as users anyway.
Sparrow made email on the Mac a nicer experience, put inbox zero in reach of everyone.
Yet both were acquiredSparrow by Gmail, Mailbox by Dropboxonly to be shut down.
The ideas may have lived on; the products, not so much.
Neither achieved anything close to escape velocity to build a profitable business around email.
By charging upfront, Superhuman didnt need every user to make it a financial success.
It instead needed only the users whoreallywanted a better email app.
When youre doing three-plus hours of email every day, its your job, Vohra told theNew York Times.
Free users arent your customers, and perhaps they will never be.
Its feedback from those users that will make your product irreplaceable.
Scale things that dont scale
Do things that dont scale, YC founder Paul Graham is known toadvise.
You should take extraordinary measures not just to acquire users, but also to make them happy.
Charge upfront, however, and things that look unscalable suddenly might make a lot more sense.
You cant afford to give every free user hands-on attention forever.
But if every new customer is paying from the start, perhaps you’re free to.
That is, if youre readyand selling an app instead of giving it away for free.
Pinboard experienced this late 2010, when Yahoo announced they were sunsetting Delicious, until then Pinboards greatest competitor.
Overnight, traffic to Pinboard shot up 20 times, peaking at over 600 new signups per hour.
That was enough to nearly take down the siteand rack up a hefty AWS bill.
Servers cost money, as do the teams that keeps sites online.
If your free website takes off, you lose resources, advisesCegowski.
Its a strange quirk of human nature.
We take stuff because its there, not necessarily because we want it, writes Anderson inFree.
Charging a price, even a very low price, can encourage much more responsible behavior.
Thats one lesson shared by many apps who had a free plan.
Free users bring more free users.
Free users eat up support.
People take advantage of free accounts, saidHubStaffco-founderDavid Nevogt.
Free plans somehow bring out the worst in users.
Charging a price, even a very low price, can encourage much more responsible behavior.
Charging doesnt guarantee your service wont be abused.
Give your customers security
Odds are youve had a favorite app disappear.
One day you relied on Google Reader, Mailbox, or Sunrise, the next they were gone.
Thats why some userswill begladto pay for your app.
Theyre purchasing peace of mind, security that your service is here to stay.
AsThe Guardians Arthur wrote, Plumbing is dull.
Plumbing is also essential.
Thats why you pay money when you get it done.
Cegowskiagrees: A sustainable, credible business model is a big feature.
People dont want to switch services.
They like your app, and if you let them pay for it, theyre committed to its success.
And you, theirs.
Deliver more value than you charge
Q: Whats the easiest way to charge money for software?
A: Build software that helps people make (or save) money.
When you help people make money, theyll happily pay.
That should be the goal of your product as well.
Sublime Text charged $70 for a faster text editors, when its alternatives were free open source mainstays.
Slack made chat fun, then charged over three times more than HipChat.
Stratechery, The Information, and others fought free blogs and business newspapers with paid tech reporting.
Superhuman one-upped everyone by charging $30 a month for a faster way to use your free Gmail account.
And they all won, building a premium market from people who wanted a better product.
They didnt just get customers, they earned superfans who sang their praises to anyone who would listen.
People value what they pay for.
When they pay, you could afford to build better products and invest more time into each customer.
