I mentioned this post in the Dalton Caldwell / Zuck convo:

What if a little site you love doesn't have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn't take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero.

I love free software and could not have built my site without it. But free web services are not like free software. If your free software project suddenly gets popular, you gain resources: testers, developers and people willing to pitch in. If your free website takes off, you lose resources. Your time is spent firefighting and your money all goes to the nice people at Linode.

maciej concludes, "Like a service? Make them charge you or show you ads."

Github, Flickr, WordPress, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Evernote, and Dropbox all are freemium.

I guess that's the future since ads aren't working and spambots dominate ad clicks.

And that's why Dropbox is my favorite startup. Great (and free) product for 94% of users; exceptional product for power users and teams.

I hear that 4shared is much bigger and very quiet about it.

Rolling in dough.

Rolling in a bathtub filled with dough!

Without a money tub you look more like Cash Cat.