15 Websites / Services I’d Actually Pay For
One measure of a service’s utility and stickiness is its ability to charge for usage. Consequently, I regularly find myself asking, “Is this important enough to me that I’d pay for it?”
Here are some of the services / sites where that answer is yes… And what I’d be willing to pay:
Gmail: I’d pay to keep my Gmail account more because the switching cost is high than because of the functionality. That switching cost is painful enough that I’d spend $75 to prevent it. I will likely end up paying for increased storage too.
Google Maps: Love Google Maps for my Blackberry. Telenav is $9.99 / mo and offers greater functionality – I’d likely pay $10 to download Google Maps or some nominal monthly fee. If Google Maps added navigational directions, I would pay $10 / month.
Wordpress.org: The benefit of blogging with WP is so significant (SEO, functionality, flexibility) that it’s well worth paying for. I’d probably pay a $200 for an installation… which makes me realize how much I rely on the product.
Google Analytics: If Google analytics weren’t free, I would unhappily pay a monthly fee to install it ($10) because, despite my disdain for the interface and lack of real-time metrics, it really is a necessity.
Google Analytics w/ Real Time Data: I would certainly pay extra for real-time Google Analytics.
Slimstat: Slimstat is a free Wordpress plugin that delivers real-time analytics. I would pay $40 to install it.
Slimstat “Premium”: … And I’d pay a lot more if Slimstat offered a model with unlimited data capturing / storage (the basic one shows the last ‘n’ records). I would pay $100 / domain.
Mint Analytics: I gladly paid $40 to install Mint on my domains. Great data and great interface.
Craigslist: I would pay for premium listings on Craigslist (if they introduced some sort of featured ads format) and I’ve paid the jobs listing fees before (many times).
Amazon Prime: I spend enough on Amazon that they gave me Amazon Prime for free when it first launched. Considering that I buy my groceries, toiletries, electronics, dog food, etc on it – I’d pay for Prime if Amazon forced me to.
iStockPhoto Premium: I love iStockPhoto – but it’s a pain to purchase credits. I’d pay for a premium account that enables power-usage.
MLB.tv: MLB is the only major sport that has truly adopted the web and their radio and video streaming is fantastic. I already pay for the service (estimates: $14.99 for radio broadcast of all games,$99-$179 for video)
Podcasts / On-demand Radio: There are certain podcasts and radio shows that I would pay to be able to download in entirety. For instance, I love The Thundering Herd on ESPN Radio but it streams too early on the west coast for me to catch it – and the Podcast only captures 30 minutes of the broadcast. I would pay $5-$10 a month to listen to it on-demand, in its entirety (price depends on whether or not ads are in the broadcast). The same can be said for Tony Bruno and JT the Brick.
eLance: I love eLance. Use it all the time. They choose to charge the service provider – but if they reversed it, I would pay on a per-listing basis. The price depends on the project, but a nominal amount ($5?).
ESPN360: It’s the only way that I can catch Duke games without leaving work at 3pm pst… I’d pay either per game or per month ($5-10) for the service. I’d pay a whole lot more if they could include MLB, NFL and NBA (would start to challenge my Comcast bill).
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May 9th, 2008 at 1:38 am
Hey Ryan, nice list. More people should think like you do
Would you pay for a service like ours, soocial.com?
May 9th, 2008 at 2:02 am
[…] more, check out Mathew Ingram, who says Hello was a solid service. As well, check out Ryan Spoon’s list of the 15 online services he would pay to […]
May 9th, 2008 at 2:05 am
Ryan,
Solid list but you’re probably the exception rather than the rule.
May 9th, 2008 at 3:29 am
Hi Ryan, nice list! I wrote a post about this subject just a few days ago. Called it “Would you pay for a web 2.0 service if it provides you value?”. Also did a small survey via Twitter and Friendfeed. People seem to be willing to pay, but only of the service provides significant value over free (ads based) services. In my opinion the FREE business model isn’t always the best model, as it also leads to walled gardens and leveraging network value instead of user value. (more in the post if interested).
May 9th, 2008 at 4:05 am
Hi Ryan, nice list. I agree with Mark Evans in that you (and probably a few select others) are the exception here. I too have been making such a list though my list includes both freeware apps that I use, as well as websites. I have recently been trying to leverage Google Analytics for my websites, and I agree with you, its definitely one of those services that I would pay for. Gmail being another, but I would add one more category, that is social news aggregating websites (like HackerNews). I have found both the links and the discussions invaluable on it, and will certainly pay for it. I think that past an initial demo period, if users were asked to pay for a service, it would greatly reduce the noise to signal ratio in any service that has a human element to it. One would probably gain far more than the minimal fee that one would have to cough up to begin with.
Thanks for the list.
May 9th, 2008 at 4:47 am
If only Google Maps worked with the iPhone. I’d pay for it then. One of the things that I really thought I’d use the iPhone for was to plot places on Google Maps around the world that I wanted to photograph and then pull them up wherever I was in the world to see what was around me that I could photograph.
Unfortunately, at least with AT&T’s edge network, Google Maps fails near 100% of the time when trying to load it on an iPhone. Not sure why.
May 9th, 2008 at 5:40 am
That’s a lot of money… You baller.
May 9th, 2008 at 5:52 am
Raju -
Fascinating. I thought a lot about what I would pay to use Digg (which I spend time on as both a reader, submitter and commenter)… I agreed that the service is important enough to me that, should they charge, I would likely pay to use it. But I couldn’t arrive at a pay-per-usage structure that didn’t somehow:
1) corrupt their system (ie a Premier account)
2) cause readers to flee (and consequently drastically weaken the Digg effect and the motivation to submit content)
Thoughts?
May 9th, 2008 at 6:14 am
I’ve been paying for webmail for years (Norada/Solve360) since 2002.
I’d also add last.fm to the list if you love music.
If a Wordpress installation was worth $200 I’d be on it, but the reality is you can get it done for $20. But if you want to spend money there’s: http://automattic.com/services/support-network/
May 9th, 2008 at 6:58 am
[shill]As big of a sports fan as you are, you should check out http://areyouwatchingthis.com. You won’t even have to worry about paying for it.[/shill]
May 9th, 2008 at 7:12 am
Nice list Ryan, it made it’s way to the homepage of Techmeme. Congrats.
Dennis G
Dutchy in San Francisco
May 9th, 2008 at 7:13 am
15 Websites / Services I?d Actually Pay For | RyanSpoon.com…
[…][…]…
May 9th, 2008 at 7:54 am
15webservice I’m paying for, and you might consider…
After reading a piece from Ryan Spoon, a former colleague of mine, on Techmeme, about 15 websites/ services he would actually pay for, I was thinking about his list of free webservices he would consider paying for. There are a…
May 9th, 2008 at 8:28 am
If you like eLance, you should try oDesk (www.odesk.com). I converted about a year ago and have never looked back.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:31 am
Ryan,
Thanks for the response. I am not sure what you meant by “corrupting their system” so I will tackle your second question (for now). I too have thought about the same issue quite a bit (I was writing up my own news aggregator a while ago). The only solution I could come up with was only allow users with a certain number of karma points to be allowed to post content (they could otherwise comment/up-down vote stories). That does bring up the question of how I would get started but I figured I could invite a few trusted sources to get things rolling (or create proxies like Reddit did in their early days).
My main point here was that if people are forced to “pay”, whether its monetary or in terms of attention, we could (???) weed out trollers/spammers. In terms of being afraid to reduce interaction, that really was never a concern to me so I guess I never thought about it. If I am one of a select few 100 people reading a news forum, all the better. I would rather have intellectual discussions that remain tightly within context than hundreds of comments (or articles) that distract me and which I would probably never read anyway (one of the reasons I stopped following Digg).
I apologize for not having a very satisfactory answer (and the long rant) but I am hoping that someone comes up with a good enough algorith. It will make a nice place to visit daily (IMO).
May 9th, 2008 at 10:00 am
[…] send you an invoice for the time you spend using dozens of random web sites to do your work. But a blog post from Ryan Spoon got me wondering: what’s out there that you would pay for if you had to? Ryan […]
May 9th, 2008 at 11:08 am
Good post. I likewise would pay a monthly fee for GMail since it’s my primary email addy. Other than that it’s a hard question to answer for many other web 2.0 sites. I wouldn’t pay for Digg or Reddit. But some services like Twitter or FriendFeed I would consider it.
May 9th, 2008 at 11:22 am
I’d be willing to bet that the ‘exception to the rule’ is reversed. I believe people would pay if the option was there, and we the geek crowd, are the cheap ones who have some serious entitlement issues.
I pay for a variety of services, Flickr and Pownce, and certainly games like Warcraft and EVE and XBOX Live’s network.
Heh maybe then that question of ‘how do you make money’ directed at all these sites would go away.
May 9th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
[…] seem to be finding some thought-provoking lists today online. This one, on the website of Ryan Spoon (great name!) is what internet services you would be willing to fork […]
May 11th, 2008 at 8:55 am
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May 11th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
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May 11th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
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May 11th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
[…] 15 Websites / Services I’d Actually Pay For Ryan lists fifteen websites/online services he would be willing to pay for, if they were not free. Worthy of note is the following in the list: Wordpress.org: The benefit of blogging with WP is so significant (SEO, functionality, flexibility) that it’s well worth paying for. I’d probably pay a $200 for an installation… which makes me realize how much I rely on the product. […]
May 11th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
[…] 15 Websites / Services I’d Actually Pay For Ryan lists fifteen websites/online services he would be willing to pay for, if they were not free. Worthy of note is the following in the list: Wordpress.org: The benefit of blogging with WP is so significant (SEO, functionality, flexibility) that it’s well worth paying for. I’d probably pay a $200 for an installation… which makes me realize how much I rely on the product. […]