How to make money off free software?

[OnTheWayUp]

The question has been pestering me all day long...

How does someone make money "selling" a free software program? Traffic? Advertising?

I would think the key here is having enough traffic to your site, to raise advertising rates, but I would think it takes alot of unique visitors to raise these stats. I would think the total repeat visitors would be low, due to having to install the program once and not needing to visit the site again.

Any comments? Anyone doing this type of business?

[phppoddotcom]

The answer is advertising and affiliate programs, Google ads, etc.

[OnTheWayUp]

The answer is advertising and affiliate programs, Google ads, etc.

Does anyone have any good articles?

[2gould]

I just read this on Seth Godin's Blog and I think it could give you some ideas:

"As the old joke goes: software, free. The manual, $10,000. But it's no joke. A couple of high profile companies, like Red Hat, Apache, and others make their living doing exactly that. They provide paid support for free software. The copy of code, being mere bits, is free -- and becomes valuable to you only through the support and guidance. I suspect a lot of genetic information will go this route. Right now getting your copy of your DNA is very expensive, but soon it won't be. In fact, soon pharmaceutical companies will PAY you to get your genes sequence. So the copy of your sequence will be free, but the interpretation of what it means, what you can do about it, and how to use it -- the manual for your genes so to speak -- will be expensive."

[OnTheWayUp]

My program is peer to peer file sharing, do I charge a monthly fee for this or offer as a free program?

[kazisdaman]

The question has been pestering me all day long...

How does someone make money "selling" a free software program? Traffic? Advertising?

I would think the key here is having enough traffic to your site, to raise advertising rates, but I would think it takes alot of unique visitors to raise these stats. I would think the total repeat visitors would be low, due to having to install the program once and not needing to visit the site again.

Any comments? Anyone doing this type of business?

Sometimes the goal of free software is actually not to make any money on that software itself, instead it can be free, gain users, and then u can come out with an additional product or service that you can generate money from.

Think of Google.

They provide thousands of free tools, they have so many users, they have a free google analytics for example, its free, but everytime someone uses it they are branding the customer to use GOOGLE tools. Then they have such high user base on their free stuff, they also now have ADWORDS and that is where they make their money.

Free Products Can Gain User Base, So You Can Earn More From Other Products You Can Target To Your Customer Base.

[veikoh]

Hosting deals, advertising, support and customer modifications. Making a program does not cost a much for the decent programmers to do. I was able to use £400 to write my mobile publishing platform and will need around £500 to finish it. Mainly I need a new Symbian 9.1 phone to test it. I do not know how some can claim everything to be 9 months IT projects?

[OnTheWayUp]

Thanks for the information!

[OnTheWayUp]

Hosting deals, advertising, support and customer modifications. Making a program does not cost a much for the decent programmers to do. I was able to use £400 to write my mobile publishing platform and will need around £500 to finish it. Mainly I need a new Symbian 9.1 phone to test it. I do not know how some can claim everything to be 9 months IT projects?

My program was pretty inexpensive also, p2p data transfer.....I have a unique way of transferring data, but the problem is i do want to make money, but then again I want to gain users.

I was thinking of a free trial period, then signing up for a small monthly fee of 4.99 thereafter.

This will also build a unique platform for advertising for the free users. So many ideas floating around for the next step, I need to buckle down and figure out the pricing.

Thanks guys.

[Dylan Phelan]

good points... esp 2gould.

you could also consider releasing a 'limited' free version.
every now and again the user is prompted to purchase the full version with all the features etc...

[OnTheWayUp]

good points... esp 2gould.

you could also consider releasing a 'limited' free version.
every now and again the user is prompted to purchase the full version with all the features etc...

Thats a good idea, Ill keep that in mind when I go live.