Darwinian principles govern the life of web services as well as the animal kingdom. For the Internet, those businesses that can remain profitable are sustainable; those without a viable business model die off or are cannibalized by other companies.
The web services below are important enough to me that I pay for them:
- Amazon Prime
- Dropbox
- Evernote[1]
- Fastmail
- Feedbin
- Flickr[2]
- iCloud storage
- Instapaper
- my domain name
- Pinboard
There are other web services that I wish I could pay for. These services are either ad-supported or running solely on investor support. In either case, I would rather pay them.
- Tumblr
- Goodreads[3]
Not paying for the above services (and Flickr, going forward) makes me worry about their longevity. Further, I feel that my data is less-safe with them, and that their developers are less responsive to the needs of us users.
Really, if you use it – and you want to continue using it – pay for it.
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Technically this is paid for by my work, but if it wasn’t, I would gladly pay for the service. ↩
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It’s been nearly a year since I paid for Flickr and in that time it’s gone free. This really worries me; Yahoo has never made what I would call a good change to Flickr. ↩
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I am a “life member” of LibraryThing, which I bought into years ago but have since stopped using since my beloved Kindle feels better connected to Goodreads. ↩