The Cost & Implications of Free(mium)

You will occasionally get an email like this <i>regardless</i> of your business model: "Does it make bingo cards? I haven't installed the free trial because I'm not a computer person. I need you to call me at XXX YYY ZZZZ and explain how to install the free trial. I don't read email that frequently, so you have to call. Oh it is my cellphone and I don't pick up usually because I am a teacher and am busy, so just keep trying until you get me."<p>Paraphrased from an email this morning. (I also got five emails today from the best customer ever. In addition to paying for AR every month has given a stunningly good testimonial and feels it is his mission in life to act as my unpaid QA department -- and he writes better bug reports than any paid QA department I've ever seen. Charge more and you will get more of him than the other kind of "customer.")

If you're losing customers because you won't provide free support for themes they didn't pay for, something tells me you're better off without them.

Actually, for me, the WooThemes Playground was what got me to purchase a theme. The Playground lets you try out all of the the themes WooThemes sales for free on a temporary hosted WordPress blog on their site. If you like what you made, you can just copy the export code, buy the theme and put it on your site, then import your code from before. Works great, and was what pushed me to finally buy a theme from them.<p>I think the moral of the story with this is, you should always have a way for potential customers to really try out your product before they buy it. For many, it may get them to buy when otherwise they might have waited out.

Flagged.<p>An article about {free themes} crammed with {free themes} keywords, without any real substance (so the cost and implications are, in short, that if we had to provide support for {free themes} that would be a lot of work that our {free themes} would cause us).<p>I don't know why this stuff gets upvoted. {free themes}!