A majority of the web development work I do is free. I offer the resulting products free of charge and I grant users permission to study, edit, and redistribute the code. This is part of my goal to support the GNU General Purpose License. The GPL is an attempt to propogate free software (think free speech, not free beer). Users have the freedom to do whatever they want with the code, which promotes continued development and innovation.
I recognize that my skills as a developer are limited in some regards. While I might be able to code a great piece of software in JavaScript, I have no idea where to start building it in Flash. I leave that up to other developers, and I encourage it whenever I can. At the same time, “free software” is somewhat limiting financially.
I can charge for my software. However, anyone who purchases a copy also purchases the right to redistribute the software for free. My customer immediately becomes my competitor – with a much lower price point. This dictates that almost all GPL software become free, though a few people fight this tooth and nail.
So I’m proposing my own profit model for GPL software. All of my work will still be protected under the GPL (meaning people have the right to redistribute it at will), but it will have a few additions:
- The software will require registration
It will be fully functional, but you will need to enter a key (similar to registering to use the multiple free APIs on the Internet) to activate certain premium features. For example, my JS Banner Rotate plug-in for WordPress would function 100% as it currently does, but you’d need to register to activate things like CSS control. Registration would cost $1 (I’m trying to keep things as affordable and close to free as possible) and would be perpetual. Consider that over 1,200 people have already installed JS Banner Rotate, this would’ve supported another year of development!I would even consider placing a temporary “Please register” banner on the top of the administration screen of some CMS systems. It would only show up under certain conditions, but it would be an easy way to remind people to support continued development.
- Continued development will require donations
I’ve seen several web comics successfully run “donate to see the next chapter” campaigns – they solicit donations in order to continue their artwork. Some of these are large-scale we-must-reach-$1000-by-Monday campaigns, others are donate-$10-to-commission-the-next-page campaigns. I think this translates well to the development community. A donation campaign based on a well-written and published roadmap would let people not only know what it takes to build out features but what features they’d get in return for their donation.
What other ways can you think of to make money from offering a free service? What other “freemium” models come to mind? If you were giving away your product or service free of charge, what would you do to see the bills paid each month?
