Several posts ago I was advising to consider or reconsider a business model even when you’re an established company. A thing which experiences its renaissance these days is try-and-buy model of sale.
It became popular with shareware, when you had either limited features of the application or limited period you was allowed to use it. Nice idea, although not working perfectly. It was always a tough decision which features should be turned off to encourage users to pay for the application. On the other hand there were a lot of different hacks (not quite legal of course) which could overrun your protections and make freeware out of your shareware.
Nowadays, with moving your app to the Web it’s not an issue any longer. When you host the application you can turn it off any moment. Now, trials earned another meaning. You don’t need to limit features any more. You don’t have to fear about stealing your software. You can give it all for a month. If someone like it she’ll buy it.
When talking about selling, the Web gives you even more. With the on-line application you have a control over the whole installation and you don’t need to sell it once for a big bunch of bucks. You can set the fair price, paid monthly, for your services and take advantage of low maintenance cost per user. Customers won’t take away a piece of software they’ve bough leaving you without even a support fee simply because there isn’t any “piece of software” any longer. Now it’s a service, not a product.
The examples of combined try-and-buy model and fair prices come from everywhere. Emusic.com charges fairly for its content and they have of course a try option. 37signals gives 30-day trial for all of their applications. Want to buy? Aren’t sure? Go and get some. You can leave it you want. No money needed. At lest not for the first month. Another example: FogCreek with 90-day money-back guarantee (no question asked). Lately FogCreek user used chargeback for the first time ever. Ian Landsman with his HelpSpot uses the same approach. Try-and-buy model pays off in his case too. That’s just a bunch of examples, but the list could be obviously much, much longer.
Try and buy with fair monthly fee is the business model which become popular recently. It’s fair for vendor. It’s fair for user. A typical win-win scenario. That’s why the combination is so successful.
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