Re: Free vs. Paid Support

Posted by SteveM on Oct 19, 2010; 3:44pm
URL: https://support.nabble.com/Free-vs-Paid-Support-tp5528523p5651348.html

Franklin <Nabble> wrote

As I mentioned before, the advertising model doesn't work for us financially and doesn't solve our core problem of spending time on support that would be better spend on development.  The 1 on 1 support we provide to paying customers drives real development, so this is actually useful to us.  It helps our development be customer driven.  We want to develop features that paying customers want.  Non-paying users are welcome to use Nabble for free but shouldn't expect us to dedicate time to their questions.  I have no problem with losing non-paying users as a result of this.  I just hope that we can continue to develop Nabble so that it increases in value to users and more and more users will be willing to pay for support as a result.

Do you not see the massive contradiction in the above post? You don't mind losing users because they are non-paying, yet you advertise nabble as a free 'service' when you admit you only look after paying customers.

The business model I proposed, a token fee of, say, 25 dollars to remove the "free nabble" advert (which would be taken up by a large number I would expect) frees up your time by being able to employ people to answer questions on your behalf, and maintain your claim that you offer a free service.

What you are embarking on is doomed, because the more people who take up your offer will end up becoming dis-enchanted with your service, as your time is split between more and more paying users demanding many and varied changes to your source code.

And that in itself is dangerous; Do you not run the risk of losing the simplicity at the core of your systems?