Services We Use Everyday – Would You Pay for Them?

Mark Ghosh and Ryan Spoon have posted on an interested concept – what if the services that we use everyday for free (or very minimal fees) and take for granted.

A few of the services mentioned were their blog publishing systems (WordPress), GMail, money saving/selling sites, analytics software, entertainment/social networking sites, and other tools that add to the online experience.

While there is an increasing amount of companies focused on the model of providing free services alongside “premium” services, what if a higher portion of the services we use on an everyday basis weren’t free?  The number of bloggers able to reproduce the same success stories that many of us have been fortunate to possess would surely be lower than it is.

If you had to list all the services you use everyday that are essential to your work/entertainment flow, how many of them would you be willing to pay for?  A few years ago (2003), as Google acquired Blogger, they decided to eliminate the “Blogger Pro” version, which ran for $35 a year, at the time, a fee that kept the service running.  Other companies and services have followed similar routes, with hidden features such as storage requiring a monthly or yearly fee.

Shortly after the elimination of fees to all Blogger users, the number of users taking advantage of blogging skyrocketed, as they didn’t have the worries of upgrading to access more storage and/or services.  Specific other blogging systems have added completely free community/developer built software for bloggers, which have largely been successes.

Returning back to the main idea, running many of the free services that bloggers use everyday are products of thousands of hours of development, testing, and huge amounts of funding for hosting fees and other development costs.  

Although it isn’t likely that a large portion of the services would adapt an all “premium” model, it is important to think about which ones are truly essential in your daily life.  Are we too consumed with free services that we don’t realize/utilize the real benefits they hold?