I’m sure we will see an impact on Yahoo’s stock Monday morning as a result. Buy! Buy!

I’ve been flirting with Flickr for awhile now and I finally signed up for the pro account. What triggered me to become a pro member and actually give them my dollars? It turned out it was a limit on the number of sets I could create. I was kind of surprised this was what did it. If you had asked me a couple months ago I would have told you if it was anything it would have been the upload limit. But it turns out I only publish select photos to Flickr and don’t upload every shot I take. So bandwidth wasn’t what put me over the edge it was a capability of the system I wanted to use.

When I hit the set limit (3) and Flickr nicely said “Hi Scott! You can only create three sets with a free account but you can create unlimited sets with a pro account. Would you like to upgrade?” My first thought was, do I really want to pay for this? I have a machine I can upload photos to, Wordpress even lets me do it through the browser. There are a ton of free photo upload sites. On the other hand I really have grow to like and enjoy using the site. I find it a joy to use and a great tool. I also love that they seem to have anticipated features I would want but never would have predicted had you asked me. Hell I give my cell phone company a lot more per month than I am going to give Flickr for a year and the service regularly pisses me off.

The “free with paid upgrade” is a very different way to think about selling [1]. I really like the concept because it appeals to the idealist in me. If you make great software and people love it, you will make money [2]. You get a chance to catch the customer using something they might not have expected before they are confronted with a cost. I feel like this raises the bar for software — it HAS to hook the customer or it gets no dollars. The customer is never in a situation where they are thinking “well, I guess I paid for this, I might as well use it.”

Where you place the paid barrier seems to be a bit of an art. You have to find a line that allows the free version to be useful but leave somebody wanting more. I think it often happens in unexpected places. This means experimenting with different formulas — fortunately something you can do with hosted software. Typepad built the barrier around features and number of blogs you can create. When I was using Typepad [3] I ended up paying simply because I wanted to map my domain to the blog.

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[1] Back in the 80’s my parents would buy a TV from Sears for Michigan football away games and then take it back after the game. Does this qualify as “free with paid upgrade”? Maybe my parents were visionaries in their market behavior?

[2] There is the part where you get them using it in the first place too. So I suppose it is “you make great software people know about…”

[3] I was a bit of a blog slut. I went quickly from using Blogger to Typepad to settling on hosting my own Wordpress instance.