There’s a difference between a service that’s free as long as you stay within its limited parameters (two users, or three clients, or two workspaces, etc.) and one that suddenly announces that it’s implementing fees in order to stay afloat. If you appreciate Chris Anderson’s thought-provoking ideas about the free price tag in his book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” you’ll know that some of the companies that lure us in with “free” may not be able to properly leverage a large non-paying customer base to stay in business.

Take the white-label social network-building site Ning, for example. Ning wasn’t entirely free. If you wanted to remove ads from your community, you had to pay $24.95 per month, and if you wanted to point your domain name to your network or get more storage and bandwidth? More fees. Then, earlier this year, Ning announced it couldn’t sustain hosting free networks and gave all the owners of unpaid networks an ultimatum: Either upgrade or migrate somewhere else.

Clearly, free tools are attractive, but there’s a risk that some of these tools may not be free in the future. How do we manage the free tools, sites and networks we are using online that are integral to how we do business? Here are some things to consider:

1. Don’t go free for “mission critical” tools. If the site or service is key to the work process or growth of your company, pay for the services you need from the start. There are fixed costs you should be accounting for every month and things like project management, invoicing and payroll, phone systems are just a few of them.
2. Go free, but budget for future fees. You can find a lot of useful tools entirely for free, but you won’t always get the features or support you really need. While you’re bootstrapping, free can fit the bill, but as you project future expenses, start adding in fees for the enhanced versions of the products you use every day.
3. Use free trials to test drive, then commit. Not sure which project management tool you want? You can try a few for free to see which one you prefer and make a better-informed decision before committing to paying.
4. Stay free by migrating. Often when a site that was free starts charging, its competitors see it as an opportunity to win new users. Let’s look again at Ning. As of this week, Ning may start eliminating non-paying accounts so make sure to choose the paid account that’s right for you. But what if you don’t want to pay? The network hosting site Grouply has been aggressive in offering not only a free alternative to Ning, but a painless way for migrating your Ning network to its service. In just a few minutes, you can import the critical content from your Ning network, including member information, then configure your new Grouply group with additional features like social network integration, event management tools and customizable websites. After that, you can send an announcement to your members informing them of the change, or use Grouply to back up your Ning network and store the content until you decide to use it again.

There’s a lot of value in “free,” but there’s even more value in planning for a future when free turns to fee. Are you prepared?

What are you using for free and how are you planning for any changes in the future?

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With the advent of blogging in business, many of us feel compelled to showcase our knowledge and expertise in our blog posts; this often means giving free advice. My favorite blog posts to write are the ones that contain some concrete, how-to information that readers can take away and act on immediately to fix or improve something.

On Twitter, this “free advice mentality” is rampant as a way to make our Twitterstream more valuable by building the number of followers we have. Many of us who do business and use Twitter in more business-oriented ways cannot deny that we hope people will also recognize our smarts and make the move to hire us.

But at what point is “free” too much?

I recently had one follower ask for my advice on how to do something on Twitter. Easy enough to answer, and I was happy to do so. That same follower, however, continued to pose more questions to me. “How do I do this?” “How do I do that?” Suddenly, the very thing I’m happy to do anytime for anyone began to bother me.

“But I get paid a lot of money to help people figure this stuff out. This is my business.” I thought.

I tried to craft something to that effect in 140 characters that didn’t sound offensive or whiny in a tweet but finally gave up. I didn’t want to seem selfish. After all, I’m one of the people who constantly talks about the need to be generous on Twitter and in social networks in general.

Why did I reach my breaking point and feel put upon by requests for advice? I began to examine my own expectations from Twitter and social networks as a marketing tool. Was it possible I was being too generous?

What I came up with as a way to analyze when free is too much is to first understand that what happens in social networks and blogs is a two-way street. It isn’t simply about your own generosity in terms of sharing ideas, advice and instruction. It is also about how others take that information, or if they take advantage of your giving that information.

Finding the right balance of “free” means:

1. You need to decide where you draw your own lines in terms of what you will share and when you should start charging;
2. We all need to understand that when someone is paid to be a consultant yet they are providing ideas, advice and instruction for free in certain forums, we should value their contribution and show our gratitude by offering to pay them for additional interactions.

It boils down to mutual respect: Respecting your readers, audience, followers, peers, friends, and wanting to teach and share information as a service to your communities.

But also your readers, audience, followers, peers,and friends need to respect that you do this stuff for a living. It is your job to define where your lines are and make this fact clear to those who read your blog, fan you on Facebook and follow you on Twitter. And when someone crosses the line, you should call them on it without hesitation.

When and how do you draw the lines between “giving it away for free” and putting your foot down and naming your price?

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One area that seems to be a “free-for-all zone” is advice. I’ve listened in on a dozen complimentary teleclasses over the past year — all free — and most have been worth exactly what I paid for them. The vast majority were a thinly veiled promotion of the speaker’s services, with less than 10 percent content. A few savvy souls actually provided 90 percent content as a way to show their stuff and entice people to sign up.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not against giving people an appropriate taste of what you can do for them. I personally place a high priority on showing some sample value to my potential PR clients before asking them to become full-fledged patrons. I find that doing so helps my productivity by increasing my closure rate. But as with most things, if you’re a freelancer, or even if you work for a company, giving away too much for free — be it a product, service or advice — can backfire, and eat into your productivity and profit.

“In the name of ‘marketing,’ many businesspeople are providing way too much information for free,” says business coach Maria Marsala. “If you don’t value your services, no one else will,” says Marsala. If you find yourself walking that fine line between holding back on information and services that you rightfully should be paid for, yet fearing that you’re missing the marketing boat, consider this: If you contacted your doctor, lawyer or accountant for a professional consultation, would you expect to be charged? Would you be shocked if you went into Best Buy to pick up Season 6 of ’24′ and they asked if you wanted to pay by credit card or cash? The bottom line is that, in general, we believe it’s fair to pay for the expertise and time of the vendors we value and the products we want to possess.

Marsala says setting boundaries on just how much “free” you are going to give away is not always easy, especially when you are asked outright for free advice on how to design a web site, solve a software snafu or cope with a computer crash. To get around the dilemma, here are Marsala’s top ten phrases for turning “at no charge” into cash:

1. My charge for an initial consultation is “x.” If we turn out to be a good match, and you hire me, I’ll apply 1/2 of “x” toward your commitment.

2. Yes, I do work with clients on “name the issue.” Would you like to set up a consultation?

3. That will cost “x” per hour.

4. There’s a lot I can do for you that’s similar to the work I did for “xyz” client. Would you like to get together and build a marketing plan? I charge “x” for that service.

5. Are you looking to hire _____? Well, I’d love to talk to you about that; my fees are “x” per hour.

6. “Well, the answer to that question depends…” and then spend a few minutes explaining some of the options and considerations. “If I were to work with you on this project, here’s how we would do it and what it would cost…”

7. A complete answer to your question is going to take more than 15 minutes over the phone. Would you like me to send you a proposal on this?

8. I have really enjoyed talking with you and would like to help more. May I send you one of my brochures and a rate card?

9. Do you have a time line and/or budget in mind for solving this problem?

10. It’s not a good time for me to discuss this right this minute. Would you like to briefly discuss project guidelines and fees?

Remember, part of what you contribute to your clients, and what they value from you, is the knowledge and expertise you’ve built up over the years. Being paid properly is about honoring those skills. But hey, that’s just my free advice.

How much work do you do for free? Is it too much?

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Web workers, too, have to deal with these kinds of requests, but I personally find that people are even less abashed about asking for advice and help related to blogs, social media, networking and other web work because they don’t regard it as a specialized service the way they do with medical and legal expertise.

I’m not saying giving away freebies is always a definite no-no, but I do think that as web workers we need to start reinforcing the value of our work by drawing a line between friendly advice and working for free. Here’s how I’m trying to create that demarcation.

Parry When Possible

I’m mostly of the opinion that the easiest way to deal with most conflict is to avoid it, and free advice is no exception. Most of the time, when people ask me to do something like set up their blog, write their cover letter/resumé introduction, or otherwise give away what I normally require a fee for, I either respond noncommittally or agree to talk to them more about it later on. It avoids unpleasant scenes with close friends and relatives, and nine times out of ten, you’ll never hear about it again.

Role Reversal

It’s hard to keep this tactic from sounding too snarky or sarcastic, but as with most things, asking someone to see things from your perspective can help curb friendly requests. Avoid the “Do I ask you to help me remodel my kitchen for free??” knee-jerk response. Instead, exercise some tact and take the time to fully explain real parallels between what exactly you do for a living, and how it is you do it. Often, people don’t think anything of asking for web working advice because they don’t see the work behind it, since the process can be fairly opaque to outsiders.

This One’s On the House

Refusing to give away advice or help isn’t always the best course of action. If, for instance, your mother wants you to help her set up a travel blog (sign up for Blogger and pick a theme), looking to make some money off the deal would probably be pretty callous of you.

Even in less clear-cut situations, the advantages of giving something away might outweigh the downsides. Always examine whether or not you might be able to work out some kind of barter arrangement in exchange for other service, or for future consideration, if you know the person you’re dealing with to be dependable and have a solid sense of fair play.

Convert the Lead

If you’re an optimist, then you won’t see requests for pro bono help as an annoyance. You’ll see them as viable sales leads, and therefore a valuable source of potential income. This is another tricky bit of business, since many people will immediately become disinterested in your services when they find out you won’t be performing them free of charge. But that actually makes it a doubly-beneficial solution, since you’ll land a sale if the person you’re dealing with has a genuine need and you’re a good salesperson, or you’ll dissuade them from coming calling on you in the future when they’re looking for free advice.

Being asked about your job is great, especially if you love it as much as I do mine. I love the opportunity to talk about what I do with people who are genuinely interested. What I don’t love is being asked to do something by someone who couldn’t care less about the how and why of web work, just so that they don’t have to do it themselves. People will only respect what you do for a living if you respect it first, and part of that means not cheapening it by doing for free what you would normally do for a fee. Plus, shouldn’t your buddy from college learn to write their own cover letter at some point?

Do you find that people often ask you for free advice/work? How do you deal with these requests?

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How much are you willing to pay for your favorite web apps and services? That’s the key question to which every app developer wants an answer. It seems as if the provider of every once-free service is now pondering ways to make money and extract revenue from their members, which makes sense when you consider that they are, after all, businesses.

Remember that old adage, you get what you pay for? Will we continue to see more of our favorite free services following this model of offering stripped down freemium accounts along with feature-rich premium plans? Will online advertising ever allow these sites to generate enough revenue to avoid going this route?

Proven Winners

Here are a couple of services that have found the right formula for success when it comes to charging their members. There might be some valuable lessons learned by examining these successful services to see how they managed to get their users to take out their wallets rather than their pitchforks and torches.

Flickr was one of the first sites to capitalize on the fact that its members needed its services. They knew that people love their photos and they would be more than willing to pay a small fee for the convenience of storing and sharing their precious collections online. The paid accounts offered a few other bells and whistles, too, which only made the decision to pay easier.

Evernote is another service that was clever enough to jump on a need it knew its members would pay for — storing notes and information in the cloud, and then having them accessible via the web from their desktop and mobile devices.

When the iPhone was released with its feeble notes app, Evernote swooped in with its own much more fully featured app, which allowed even more users to tap into their service, and thus into their wallets.

Contenders or Pretenders

Here are a few services that show promise as they venture into paid subscription territory from the freemium universe. They originally hooked their users with totally free service, and only later announced their membership plans. Time will tell if they made the right move.

Jott emerged on the scene with an ambitious service that allowed its members to save their audio notes to the web via their mobile device. It also cross-posted to other services such as Twitter, Facebook and Remember the Milk. For the longest time it was free and in beta, then it announced its premium plans. There’s still a free plan but it’s extremely limited. Many members opted out, but many of them stuck around for one of the new paid plans.

Box also enticed members with free online storage but then later added premium plans with greater features such as larger file size for uploads (25 MB vs 1 GB, for example) and much more storage space (1 GB for free accounts vs. 30 GB for Business accounts).

While there are a slew of online storage services comparable to box.net (including some free ones with much larger storage), Box has wisely continued to innovate and has released many new features and options to make its service stand out. For example, its ability to work with your desktop applications as well as mobile devices is very handy. It has also released its own online apps to create documents and save them directly to your account.

Dropbox is another online storage service. It’s similar to Box but it does things a little differently. It provides the ability to automatically synchronize your files from multiple computers and provides twice the space of box.net for free accounts (2 GB). It also has premium accounts for far greater amounts of data.

Services That Will Start Charging Someday

Hulu is extremely popular these days. It remains free, but look for it to trot out some premium services soon. The companies behind it, NBC and ABC/Disney, are no slouches when it comes to making a buck, so hold on to your wallets. Clear signs of its financial plans is the way it has thwarted boxee’s attempts to share its content with its user base. The message is “No pay, no play”.

Yes, even the red-hot popular media darling Twitter has been struggling with the subject matter of monetization. Its difficulties with discovering a way to make money have been analyzed to death by countless financial experts and business gurus. It has looked at charging users for premium services, implementing advertisements and charging third party services for access to its API. Ultimately, no one knows how Twitter will cash in on all of its recent media coverage. No matter what it does, they will become the perfect case study in courses for future web entrepreneurs.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, most sites will fail if they aren’t careful when it comes to charging for their services. Recession or not, there are only so many services anyone can pay for, no matter how slick the interface or how many bells and whistles they offer. However, they also need to conduct themselves as a business and find a way to pay the bills.  At the end of the day, it’s always going to come down to a question quality of service and quantity of need.

Do you use mostly free services, or mostly pay? What factors help convince you that a service is in fact worth paying for?

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Second, the same issue came up at a recent installment of #editorchat, a weekly group meeting held on Twitter for professional writers and editors hosted by @milehighfool and @LydiaBreakfast. The question was whether writers ever did work just for the byline, exposure, and/or clips for their portfolio, and what people thought of that kind of activity. In general, the group was very averse to it, because it encourages publications to seek free submissions instead of paying writers.

There are exceptions to every rule, however, and we did agree that when you’re starting out, it’s fine to do free work for the purpose of building up your portfolio. But in today’s climate, as companies look to cut costs, will more businesses turn to unpaid resources?

If you work online, even if it’s not in a writing or editing capacity, you are bound to do some work that you don’t receive any compensation for. Sometimes that’s not your choice (I’m looking at you, clients who conveniently ignore invoices from small fish freelancers), but sometimes it is. When you do choose to do something for free, does it weaken the revenue-generating powers of the industry as a whole?

I try to limit the work I do for free to clearly defined categories. That is, I will work for free in segments where I don’t think enough capital exists to support an ecosystem of paid professionals. For example, the Canadian small press literary scene. There is no way that this space would even exist if all of its players sought compensation for their efforts. Additionally, I hope that my work in this area  supports the arts, and that is reason enough for me to pursue it.

Are my justifications for doing this work free of charge unassailable? Definitely not. One could argue that the only reason money doesn’t flow in that particular market is because there’s a glut of writers and editors like me, doing work for free that would otherwise become publicly or privately funded.

What I can’t abide is private, advertising-funded sites soliciting repeat, free submissions and offering their writers nothing but a byline and, maybe, the faint hope of a paid position writing for their print publication. That kind of behavior fosters the impression that blog writing is something not worthy of pay, making it awfully hard to be recognized as a professional in the field.

Can working for free also help you? Of course it can. Writers just starting out need some way of building their portfolios, after all. But the more the big players see this sort of thing is possible, the more reluctant they’ll be to part with their money.

I’ve talked mostly about writing above, but you could easily substitute in examples from the world of web and graphic design (check out the movement against spec work in design at no-spec.com), business consultation services, and many other web working areas.

Am I just jealously guarding my own sources of income, or does the prospect of someone doing the work you should get paid good money for, absolutely free of charge, leave you feeling out of sorts as well? Is there room for both, and where do we draw the line?

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Everyone, especially computer people, love lists of resources. I do as well, and I decided it’s time to share many of the resources that have helped me in my career. All of these resources (except for the print books) are either freeware, open source, or the application offers a free version.

Firefox

• Firebug – Essential tool for CSS/JavaScript debugging.
• YSlow – Firebug add-on to help determine performance bottlenecks.
• Web Developer Toolbar – Provides tools to compliment Firebug.
• Fireftp – The best FTP client and in a browser no less!
• Dust-Me Selectors – Scans the page against your current style sheet to determine extraneous styles.
• Server Spy – See the server technology for current page.
• Colorzilla – Awesome color picker.
• HTML Validator – Validate pages and clean them with this tool.
• IE Tab – View pages in IE inside Firefox.
• Selenium IDE – Record and playback end-user testing.
• X-Ray – Bookmarklet to examine elements in DOM.

Web Worker Applications

• Box.net – Backup your files with this tremendous tool.
• Harvest – Time tracking utility.
• Jott – Record messages from your phone and add them to various applications.
• Gliffy – MS Visio replacement for diagramming.
• Yugma – Free video conferencing.
• 101 Essential Freelancing Resources – Need more than we’ve got here?

Print Books

• Designing with Web Standards – A great introduction to web standards design by Jeffrey Zeldman.
• CSS: A Definitive Guide – Eric Meyer’s magnum opus on CSS.
• Don’t Make Me Think! – The acclaimed introduction to usability.
• Codin’ For the Web – Great book to teach application development to designers.
• Web Design in a Nutshell – Invaluable desktop reference.

Online Books

• Version Control with Subversion – Introduction to the precepts of Subversion.
• Getting Real – 37 Signals famous work on design.
• O’Reilly Library – Various O’Reilly books you can read online.
• The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web

Tutorials

• W3Schools.com – XHTML, CSS, PHP, SQL, XML, etc.
• Good Tutorials – Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator, PHP, HTML, etc.
• PHP for the Absolute Beginner
• ASP.NET 2.0 Quickstart Tutorial
• Learn CSS Positioning in 10 Easy Steps

Editors

• CSS Vista = Neat CSS editor.
• PSPad – Simple, fast editor that I used for a long time.
• Aptana – Editor built on Eclipse that, I think, is the best out there.
• Microsoft Visual Web Developer – Free MS editor to create ASP.NET applications.
• SQLYog – GUI interface to MySQL.
• SQL Server Management Studio Express – The free edition of the GUI to SQL Server.

Templates

• Open Source Web Design
• Themebot – Themes for Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, and phpBB among others.
• Open Web Design
• The Open Design Community
• The CSS Tinderbox – CSS layouts.
• Little Boxes – CSS layouts.

Project Management/Version Control

• Assembla – Free TRAC/Subversion workspaces.
• TRAC – Slim, extensible SDLC tool.
• Subversion – The great open source source control.
• TortoiseSVN – GUI interface into Subversion via Windows shell.
• AnkhSVN – Browse Subversion repositories inside Visual Studio.

Testing/Validators

• UITest.com
• The Scrutinizer – SEO validators and analysis.
• Test Everything!
• Web Site Tools
• WAMP - Apache, MySQL, and PHP on Windows

Application Comparison

• Wiki Matrix – Compare wiki applications.
• Forum Matrix – Compare forum applications.
• WebBlog Matrix – Compare blog applications.
• The CMS Matrix – Compare CMS applications.
• OpenSourceCMS – Demo various CMS’.

Web Designer Blogs/News Aggregation

• Design Float – Digg style site for designers.
• Web Developer’s Handbook – More resources then you could ever need.
• CSS Juice – CSS tips and utilities.
• Smashing Magazine – The best resource for resources.
• .net Develop – Cutting-edge articles on web technology best practices.

Chris Poteet is a web application developer under his company name, Siolon.

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