[asterisk-biz] FWD moving to $30 annual membership fee

[Trixter aka Bret McDanel]

On Tue, 2008-08-12 at 13:44 -0400, SIP wrote:
> I'm not sure how charging for something that has lasted this long for 
> free will necessarily kill it off. After all, if they're not getting 
> money from it NOW, then they wouldn't be getting money from it if no one 
> paid, either.

Well the difference would be user attrition.  People arent canceling
their accounts because they are free, so its easier to abandon them as
steve pointed out.  Once that is dealt with you have the users who use
the service only because its free and will leave when it goes to a pay
to play model.  

If they do not get enough people retained then they will have issues,
since paying for something is likely to cause some to expect a certain
level of customer support and other things.  

 
> That's $24,000/year more than you had before to handle costs such as 
> bandwidth, hosting, hardware maintenance, etc (none of which are minimal).
> 
but will people still *volunteer* to do support for them when they are
charging for the service?  That would be $24k to the plus, but how much
to the minus to replace the support people that currently are volunteers
doing it for free in their spare time.  


> More important questions for ME would be are they still going to allow 
> incoming calls into their network from outside? Or will you have to be 
> an official FWD peer (which is a pay-per-connection peering network) ?
> 
if they do that they will kill it even faster, once you make it a club
that only paying members can participate in, the value of it goes down.
As I see it the value is a stable sip address more than anything else.
For many setting up their own sip stuff is not the easiest thing, so
they would want something like this, however someone *could* set up a no
media sip proxy (ser, freeswitch, maybe asterisk if that works properly
now, and so on) and toss that on a $2-5/mo server (or use it as
marketing for some other paid service) and let people register for
accounts and call enum known numbers, possibly provide some tollfree
gateways, possibly set up a FWDout system, etc, and go to town, and only
do it based off donations.  If it is donation based, and your costs are
somewhere around $70/year somehow I think you could do this and be
everything FWD is without the mandatory $30/year price.

Further you could try to work out better interconnect methods.  For
example bridge to googletalk, skype via g.729 (shhhh they dont want
anyone to know they use SIP and g.729 in the back end of things), etc.
You would probably have to contend with gizmo which already does all of
this (I dont know about skype though) but you get the idea.  

The "hey is free then we charge" model is not new, its been used by
many, even skype, to boost exposure then once people are hooked they
dont want to switch.  I just dont see the type of users with FWD that
say skype has attracted with their offering so I have a feeling there
will be a large attrition and bills may outweigh the revenue.  


-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
Belfast +44 28 9099 6461        US +1 516 687 5200
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