Charging from Day 1: Genius or Deathknell?

One point the article doesn't stress is that charging money removes a whole slew of problems, chief among them spam and ghost accounts. This frees up a lot of development time, since you don't have to make the system resilient to waves of signups by people you'll never see again, or spend a lot of time on abuse prevention.<p>That's the good part. The bad part is, you then use all that spare development time on getting your payment system working smoothly. Since you are taking someone's money at the very outset, making a decent first impression becomes especially important. I suggest setting up payments so if something goes wrong, the account gets activated anyway, and you settle up later by personal contact with the customer.

Apps that rely on network effects to be successful need a free model, or an existing base with critical mass. The latter is nice if you have it.<p>Freemium is a great way to get some users to pay for value created out of the total network effect created by mostly free users.<p>I don't think Markus Frind was swinging for the fences when he created plentyoffish.com with a free model. I think he realized how hard it was going to be to get enough people on a dating site to make it interesting.

One question not asked enough is "why do you want to make a web app?" if it's to do what you love and get paid for it... Then do what you love (make apps) and get paid for it(charge money).<p>Mark z's goal on facebook was probably not to make millions upfront. He had different motivations and because that came through in his work, the money was merely a side effect.<p>The mistake some entreprenuers may make is they are driven by what they love as an independent vehicle to monetary success, then choose to make something people won't want to pay for.

(to paraphrase:) "Do you want 10,000 users paying nothing or 1,000 users paying something"<p>This is the key take-away for me. I know a lot of founders who, frankly, are building startups for megalomaniac reasons.<p>I think there is some "look at all these users who like my product (and thus me) so now I'm a rock star" philosophy in there, which isn't helped by people like Ashton Kutcher and MC Hammer coming into the scene.<p>We're about to complete a pretty tasty angel round for an SaaS app that has a healthy monthly recurring subscription on it from Day 1. I'm pretty psyched.<p>However, because its b2b it's never going to achieve me the 'rockstar appeal' that running a startup with millions of free accounts on it will would. I don't mind, but I know that frankly that's what dis-interests a lot of founders.

I'm waiting another post from this guy describing how they got tired fight the fraud and now they do offer their app for free.<p>PS. We are charging from day 1 and it's damn not easy. Really! If fraud does not kill you in a year, there's 90% of success.

paid system definitely has its benefits, while you are debating free vs monthly charges, how about one time nominal sign-up fee till the site is in business? Similar model as iPhone Apps, where for some odd reason, people are more inclined to pay than for web apps. I wonder if anyone has had serious success with such a model on the web ?