You're being a message board geek, axod. If you have to pick your poison, and it's signing up for recurring credit card charge versus using Altavista instead of Google, I already know what your answer is. Google didn't have to be free; they chose to be, because given a spectacular product, they had spectacular freedom to find the best way to make money.
I'm sorry, what? If the options were "Google for $5 a year vs. Altavista", you think Google wouldn't have still have gone public?
Clearly, Google had better ways to make money; when you have something as excellent as Google, you have options. But don't take as your thesis that "even Google had to go free".
"Clearly no one would ever pay to be able to use google to search" - So if Google started charging you a dollar a month tommorrow you would gladly start using Altavista instead?
$5 a year is a ridiculously low income when compared to advertising. I seriously doubt google would still be around if they had tried to charge users to search the web. Altavista wasn't that bad.
I'm simply pointing out that some services don't really work too well as a 'paid' model.
Also you've got the fact that some of your competition is going to be free. If you want to now charge users directly, you have to be at least 10 times as good, or be offering something seriously different to make them pay.
I'm still firmly in the freemium camp.
1. Make something, get people to use it
2. Grow, make profit from advertising (Stay lean, keep costs low)
3. Once you're big enough, some subset of your users will be willing to pay for extra features
If you instead go for paid only, I don't think you can reach anywhere near the same audience.
I would absolutely be willing to pay $24 a year for what Google offers for free if the alternatives were what existed before those services got big (i.e. altavista and hotmail).
Search and spam were both huge time-sinks.
Everytime I hear about Google starting to charge for something, or taking something away, I remember the time someone just told me to use Google because it was free, and easy.
I should have noted that they hadn't been on the internet in the 90's when Microsoft did the same with Hotmail, and others.
Ultimately, nothing is free.
Still,I can't help but wonder if ads in emails didn't generate enough cash so now it's tiem to charge.
I am pretty sure that Google provides a lot of those services at a loss, or at the very least, they can synergize with other projects they have in way that justifies the cost.
Either way, people will choose the free option rather than the option that requires them to pay even a nominal fee, particularly for software that people have gotten used to getting for free.
One of the best thing about google is that outta free. Charging a premium subscription for Google is no longer google but a different product all together
When it's in their interest to make it free - to drive usage or gather data to train AI, you pay with your data.
Once that data is no longer of any value they then make you pay with cash. Google Maps API, soon reCaptcha are other products that started out free.
Ever tried a search you may have done 5,10 years ago?
Good luck finding obscure old stuff in Google's index even if it still exists - they just don't keep everything forever once it can't have advertising put against it.
Google has over 128MM users. Assume Google just gets the "really amazing product" conversation rate of 10%; at $5/year, that's a recurring revenue stream of $64MM/yr, at the lowest conceivable price point you can come up with for a good product.
"But $64MM is fuck-all compared to the billions it makes now!" Of course that's true, but that's besides the point. Almost any product company number is going to suck compared to what Google can post now. I'm not arguing that Google should be a free service. I'm saying they had options, and it wasn't necessarily between "free or die".
It's not so much the difference between free and paid that matters as whether or not the pricing is actually economically viable. The original GAE pricing pretty obviously wasn't, so it might as well have been a free product in that you were relying on Google continuing to want to subsidize it for whatever reason.
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