FREEMIUM VS PREMIUM
An engineering graduate from Anna University, Rakesh has been closely working with Top global IT vendors on various Unified Communications and core networking projects. He is a Cisco certified Advanced collaboration Architecture sales specialist
One fine evening while I was contemplating on the debate between free and paid services my cousin who was passing by bumped on to me and enquired why I was in deep thoughts. So I told him about what I was thinking and figured out that he was trying to tell me something and obviously he told me like “Bro, Wikipedia is a free service and it is working like a butter”. “Google is a free service and Facebook and so on….” he continued. I was totally frustrated hearing this from him as I am a professional service value Manager and don’t want to give out free services to my customers. I badly need to defend myself. I asked him couple of questions like “Where do Wikipedia store all their work?” obviously it should be in some datacenter and next question “Won’t that DC charge Wikipedia/FB/Google for using their service?” He replied “Bro, yes they will charge them. But I am not paying them to use it right?”
In my previous organization my Sales target per Quarter is $500K and yearly $2Mil. It was 2012, I was using a stellar tool called as “Jigsaw” for contactdatabase generation. I was meeting my targets using this tool and life was great. One day, it was 2014 “Jigsaw” was bought by “Data.com” and all of the sudden they said you need to pay for what you use. I was shocked, helpless. I
can’t go to my Board and ask them to buy me this tool. Following quarter I was able to make only $400K and it is 20% drop in my performance. Why I failed this Q is the next question and actually what I was doing most of the time in this Q is trying to figure out some other redundant free tool, which can help me. I actually got some. But using the new tools was somewhat complicated and drained more of my time.
My Personal Experience
Wow, I am getting the lead. I replied “There you’re. So shall we term it as ‘someone must’ve paid’ service rather than just ‘free’ service?” What I should have done? To call “Data.com” and asked for free service? Actually, I can’t. What happened was, they sent me an email to well explain about the new features and benefits and explained how they can save some big time in the process of getting a sale. Finally, with a jaw-dropping subscription plans. Now it is PREMIUM not FREEMIUM.
Big Questions…..
Can we just guarantee the continuity of the free service? Can we blame someone if something gone wrong with the free service? Any upgrades? Reliable redundancy on other free stuffs?
The answer to all the above questions is a “BIG NO”.
My predictions on how any free service will evolve to be a PREMIUM services….
Income – promising greater revenue against the spending Value – promising value for their customers and they ask them to pay only for the driven-value Truth – Actually turning on the fee won’t easily destroy a business.
AH, there are some more questions to be answered and let us figure out why many people succeed in their business using the PREMIUM services. This maybe a way to bill their customers against the value added to their business. 1. Attending to their customers and giving them time for their queries, doubts and feedbacks 2. No Expensive pricing. But they are going to price it “fairly” 3. Learning from the customer and rewarding them 4. Long-time customer will be getting a greater benefits 5. They take a big leap by asking the customer to only pay if they’re satisfied
A Big thanks to my iPad (I paid.), Office365 (someone must’ve paid), helping me to scribble.