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Free vs. Fee

MSNBC's Your Business: Profit Margin 03:28

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December 14, 2009

Jason Fried, co-founder and President of 37signals, a Chicago-based business that creates software applications for small businesses, discusses when a small business should offer freebies and when they should be charging a fee for their services.

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MSNBC's Your Business, Profit Margin, Video, msnbc, jason fried, profit margin, fee

What do you think?

Join the conversation ( 1 )

STEVEN SUE 2 years 1 months and 22 days ago

"Free" is simply an extreme version of the traditional loss-leader model. Traditional merchandising strategy has always utilized low, no or even loss-margin trials in order to be positioned for the high-margin "upsell."

Free doesn't necessarily cheapen your position and can be very useful toward getting prospects to try your stuff, particularly for intangible and esoteric products like software. If they don't get it, they won't buy.