Because WellcomeMat will eventually be a pay per usage service, I sometimes find myself defending our position on why and how WellcomeMat will succeed against “free”. I put the word free into quotes because nothing really is free is it? Anyway, I was recently talking to Aaron Sperling of vFlyer about this, and thought it would be a good idea to gauge the paid vs. free sentiment of our readers.

To me (and I am as fallible as the next guy), there is no argument against a pay per usage service so long as the company of mention has the best service around. Here is why I say this:

I have never come across a company that offers their product(s) for free, or through an ad revenue model, that has good support.

Free services…well…they don’t generate revenue. A company that gives its product away for free (unless over-funded) cannot hire and keep the best engineers around. And, without talented/patient people to answer support calls and emails, the hopes for effective support (prompt, thorough, and quick to resolution) go out the window. The collective meaning behind these factors is that this company cannot quickly fix fundamental flaws in their products/usability.

Tech companies with ad revenue models have to maximize page views, and overall volume on their site(s). This means that their support:user ratio is almost always way out of whack. Additionally, their money comes from (you guessed it) advertisers. Serving advertisers (maximizing profits) means asking users to fumble through content/page changes as much as humanly possible to maximize ad impressions. Worse in my opinion is the fact that BIG (site rank/traffic) often becomes more important than the quality of the experience for the user. Could we possibly come up with a better example of this than MySpace?

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