Many folks have started to ask these very valid question – why free? How will they sustain? What will be the guarantee that this will be free?

Doom sayers have doubted the free model and they will always continue to do the same.

With this post I would like to give out very openly my take on why InfoSignz was relaunched in the free avatar.

Right off the bat, I would like to state that the most common services on the internet are free – search, email, news, word processing, video hosting, image hosting – the list goes on. Therefore digital signage should not be free, that does not follow from the traditional way of doing business over the internet.

All the businesses that are stated above, and indeed many more, have some or the other business model that makes the dough for them. Advertisements are the primary source of revenues. Another source is the premium account.

Before discussing our revenue model, I would like to explain the rationale behind making InfoSignz free over the web. A free service, if really made usable makes for a great mouthpiece of the product itself. And if the free version is good, imagine what the paid one would be like? So instead of me and my sales team going door to door, in a bid to sell, we have people find us, sign up and use and see the product to their satisfaction. And if they need more features, they come and talk to us.

Moreover, we get inputs from such a varied customer base that does nothing but enhance our understanding of this market and the needs. And we try to put in as many features as possible from this feedback.

Now coming to the business model. We have to make money and the obvious question is how.

We will make money once we launch our paid version of the service. I cannot really go into a lot of detail as to what the paid version would entail at this point. Our paid version will have features that many customers will want to pay for. At least that is the hope moving forward.

The paid version will be a SaaS model. The pricing would be such that it will allow even the advanced features within easy reach of even smaller businesses. It will be a per location per month pricing model and strictly on a pay what you use for basis. We have been guided by the philosophy of cutting out the capital expenditure in the software head and make even the recurring expenditure so small, that it becomes almost nothing.

We are hoping to launch this by the end of April or early May and will keep you posted through this blog.

Would love to see comments posted on this whole free versus paid thing. I am up for discussion…