Do you suppose those open source contributors are getting any of the payout?

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I paid, I figured it’d be less work to pay than to migrate.

Have to say, what I appreciated about ning was the polish, the fact that it was clean & functional. The features have been disappearing from my “lite” account.

Have to say, it’s gone from a “yaaay” in my books to a slightly rumbling sound, with the distinct possibility of booing and missiles in the near to mid future. I’ve submitted feature ideas, as I have done in the past… and got back bot-mail saying “your package does not include support… so your email went in our recycle bin”.

Rumble rumble.

Maybe Ning should have changed their model so that if you have X amount of community members then you get additional free features?

I think from a business perspective that when you analyzed the numbers it probably made sense to cut the free networks, but how does this affect the pipeline of communities going forward? How many communities joined Ning at first because it was free and then grew to the point where they were willing to pay? These questions are going to be what makes or breaks Ning going forward.

I was just reading David Skok’s blog post on how sales complexity impacts a startups viability – http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/sales-complexity/. While Ning isn’t a startup anymore, they are certainly impacting their sales complexity by moving from a freemium model to a more complicated sales process. They will also be increasing the cost of customer acquisition as well.

It should be interesting to see how Ning plays out going forward.