Tech: Pinboard founder: Free Web apps suck because they get acquired
- What if a little site you love doesn’t have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn’t take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero.
- Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski • Offering a rarely-heard take on the free-Web-app movement — that startups without business models are only hurting end-users, an argument that’s fresh in the minds of some after Gowalla’s staff got acquired by Facebook, but not its product. (This is a pain we know all too well, thanks to the pending death-by-acquisition of Apture and our scramble to replace it.) And in case you’re wondering, Ceglowski follows his own advice — he charges a one-time $9.55 fee to join his Delicious competitor. We’re with him (though we’re not opposed to the freemium idea that sites like Reddit use). We’ll gladly pay a $10 one-time fee to use a product if it means the product’s still going to exist in three years. source