Out of interest, is there any research to back the idea of selling your product at the same time as giving it away for free ultimately results in higher sales? A trade-off between exposure and "lost" sales I guess?
See: github, dropbox, and probably a thousand others. Both companies claim free accounts are marketing costs for expanding their networks of paid subscribers.
Neither of those two examples give away their core software for free though, which sounds like what Simperium are going to do.
I'm absolutely not saying it can't work, and kudos to Simperium for taking this approach, it looks like there is an absolutely great product there and I'm going to be checking it out.
There are of course examples where this does work, RedHat for example (heh - I do it myself as well!), but I was wondering if anyone has tried to look at it analytically, or is it just a gut feeling that this is the right approach to maximise revenue?
I think this is a great call. I'll be investing time into trying your service out now that I know that if you guys ever need to disappear or your pricing model becomes incompatible I'll have another choice.
