"Are there not sufficient free open source tools to monitor your server and mail you when it goes down? Why would some of those big ticket customers ever pay for something like this?"<p>You're trading money for (someone else's) time. I could build pingdom for my own services, but I don't want to. I'd have to build it, scale it, maintain it, and monitor it.<p>I'd rather pay someone else to do it for me, and I'm technical.
$10, or even the $40 plan, is a negligible cost to even a 1-man operation, and to a "big ticket" company, it might as well be free. So don't even take into consideration the cost. Keep in mind "open source" software isn't actually free, you have to pay an engineer to install and maintain it, learn how to configure it, fix it when it breaks, etc. Those costs are easily higher than $40/mo even if someone's only spending 15 minutes a month on it.<p>What Pingdom seems to be offering is a (basically free if your business isn't being funded on a credit card) service that requires very little time and know-how to maintain. Clients probably chose it because their time is more valuable than the monthly cost of the service. Contrast that to open-source, which is perfect for those who'd rather spend extra time than extra money.
You probably underestimate the added-value that (most) webapps provide over open-source tools or the code-it-yourself approach.<p>We pay for Pingdom's service because:<p>* our time is precious, we'd rather not do it ourselves.<p>* we don't want to be monitoring our monitoring tools to make sure their work.<p>* they provide a lot more features (reporting, API), which we actually need and use.
Webapps which duplicate the functionality of open-source tools can make money, but I think they have to position themselves well. Basically I think people will pay for this type of webapp if:<p>* The web app is substantially more convenient than the desktop open-source app,<p>* It is important/useful that the app in question be available anywhere, not just on the user's computer, or<p>* It is much simpler to use than the free app and provides a service useful to people not used to open-source tools.
If the service saves me a bit of time and headache, then yes I will pay for it. For your blogVault, do what I suggested in your comment: Allow me import ALL my historical writings (of which I am sure there are about 10.000 pages of floating around on the internet), and I'll pay you what you want. I want my writings on paper, not on websites that shut down and throw away stuff I spent a lot of time coming up with.
This is a great question. I've asked myself as much and I think it comes up any time someone decides to sit down and write an app.<p>To me, the short answer is that pople can be enticed to pay for webapps when the app delivers value and solves a problem. Open source tools all too often solve a problem, but do so in a way that fails to deliver value.<p>For certain customers, there's a difference between " I can do this myself " and "It's worth it for me to do this myself". Open source solutions usually fall into the first category. Paid apps allow customers to answer no to the second question.<p>I went into a bit more detail on my blog at <a href="http://nathanroach.posterous.com" rel="nofollow">http://nathanroach.posterous.com</a>.
Is there really a Pingdom equivalent in FOSS land? I'm not sure - I do not use it, but I've seen many cases where open source advocates claim they have "equivalent" software, but in reality they just have base-level libraries that are half-way there.<p>e.g., a DOCX-parsing library is not the same thing as a MS Word competitor. Having the libs to do something is not the same as having a turnkey solution ready to fly.<p>A better thought is this: why is that people are willing to <i>pay money</i> to <i>not</i> use free, open source software? It's either a triumph of marketing, or a strong commentary on the quality of your open source project.
My start up went through several stages of site monitoring. First I'd set up a script that curled a couple URLs and emailed me if it didn't work. I wanted slightly more sophisticated monitoring and I wanted text messages. So I tried to install Nagios. It was a pain and I never got it set up.<p>Then SiteCanary posted their launch here. I signed up that day and never thought about monitoring again. It's worth every penny (and it's really cheap). I'm sure I'd otherwise be spending at least an hour a month on monitoring.
Lets continue with the pingdom example. I work for a small startup and the reason why we would pay for a webapp to do these things is because it is not a part of our product or one of our core competencies. So settings up and managing these things is a waste of developer/sys-admin time, and in the long run, it turns out to be cheaper to just outsource it.<p>Its the same reason we pay for github rather then set up our own git server, and the list goes on.
You are underestimating the mental and actual friction caused by open-source. Paid services bring a peace of mind that your server won't crash, some setting won't mess up etc. To a technical guy, those things may seem super small. But (1) little maintenance things add up (2) they are worth not having to deal with <i>especially</i> if you can pay just a few bucks for the peace of mind.