Re: Free vs. Paid Support

Posted by Franklin <Nabble> on Oct 20, 2010; 4:36am
URL: https://support.nabble.com/Free-vs-Paid-Support-tp5528523p5653544.html

SteveM wrote

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 service is free, so we aren't lying, but I agree that the home page could be improved to explain what we are doing.  We will update the homepage when we have time for that.

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.

$25 per what time period, per year?  A programmer costs around $50K, so that's $50K/$25 = 2000 Nabble sites paying for this.  We wouldn't get close to this.

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?

We are developing a templating system internally which we will release eventually.  But for now, we use this system to support custom requests which means that we don't pollute our code.  As we improve this system, we will be able to more easily handle custom requests which will allow us to scale up and handle more users.  And when the system is solid and proven to be able to handle many custom requests, we will release it publicly so that all users can customize their Nabble site.