Interestingly I think both are the only two services I think I have bought off the net.

Please put “Plans and Prices” on the front page. I was reading that it increases sign-ups significantly. I know I’m the same way, I never sign-up if I don’t know how much it’s going to cost. “Signup Free” is very vague. You should either say “100% free service” or put prices on the front page.

Do you have businesses using your app? If you do, you should think about business pricing. For most businesses difference between $20 per month and $30-$50 per month is negligible. Think of it this way: if TweetMiner saves a person who’s paid $40/hour at least 2 hours a month, paying $40/month makes great sense. You can estimate how much time TweetMiner saves and put it on your website.

You said that most users login for a few minutes a day, search couple of times, send a few tweets and logoff. As far as I understand you have no chance to convert those users to paid users using Twitter API calls limitation. Did you think about offering 30-60 day trial instead of free accounts? I’m not very familiar with Twitter so I don’t know how many competitors you have and how sticky your app is. But think about this: if you don’t have free users, only trials, you can have $3-$5 plan for those who are using TweetMiner for free now. Yes, you will convert only 2%-4% of free users to paying customers but you won’t have to support hundreds of thousands free users forever.

I made a big mistake of making free software thinking it will drive traffic and sales of paid software. Now we are spending 2-3 hours a day supporting hundred thousand free users. Of course it’s a little different with desktop software and it requires more support but still. If your free offer does what most users want, you will have the hardest time selling them something. Think about what will happen when you get to 100,000 free users. Will your paying users provide enough revenue to keep you in business? How much time will you spend answering questions? Will you have enough money to hire another person to help you?

Sorry if that sounds like a rant but after 6 years of making/supporting free software I think offering something for free is a mistake that makes everyone in the industry suffer. Of course, if your plan is to sell TweetMiner to Twitter, everything above doesn’t apply. Make all accounts free, get VC funding when you get bigger and forget everything I said 🙂

@niczar Yeah, that’s a fair criticism. While listening to a playback of the podcast I noticed that as well. Wince.

There are ways around this. You can put language in your user agreement and privacy policy to allow occasional promotion of the owner’s / employee’s other projects. If you don’t overdo it most users would probably be fine with this.