When you are launching your service/product online, the most attractive business model on the internet is to offer the service for free.
It let the service grown quickly and users can gain a quick understanding of the service without risk. But when the service is a success, what is the next step?

The first issue to solve when launching your service online is to grown, so free access is the easiest way to do this. Then the next issues is to handle the growth and how to handle the headaches of growth like spammers, how to scale the infrastructure, how to handle quality issues etc.

I believe that the best way to go is a modest annual fee model. You charge a small amount of money for one year. This can be very small meaning between 1 and 49 euro a year.
The mathematics of the internet is like playing with big numbers, this is certainly true when we are talking about a success stories. Look at Face book, 350.000.000 users (read 350 million), multiply this with 1 dollar, that is 350 million dollars extra income.
This is much more then what they earn now. The same for Twitter, they will earn millions of dollars and much more then the 0 dollor they earn now.

This money can be invested in extra growth, in advanced infrastructure and in creativity by hiring employees.

The whole idea can be read on : FrederikVanLierde.wordpress.com

So my question to you is:
How do you handle the growth of your online service?
Are you thinking of to ask a modest annual fee to your users? if not what stops you to do so ?

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