{"id":9416,"date":"2014-04-01T16:18:16","date_gmt":"2014-04-01T14:18:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/owncloud.com\/?p=9416"},"modified":"2014-04-01T16:18:16","modified_gmt":"2014-04-01T14:18:16","slug":"free-ride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/owncloud.com\/de\/blogs\/free-ride\/","title":{"rendered":"There is no Free Ride"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continuing our past thread<\/a> on the concept of \u201cfree\u201d file sync and share for business, there was a very interesting in-depth report<\/a> out last week from Tech Crunch on the upcoming Box IPO. What struck us in particular was the cost to Box \u2013 and the prevalence \u2013 of its free users. According to the story:<\/p>\n

The cost of supporting Box\u2019s free users, who are an important part of its future profits, is high. Note that the highlighted sum includes various other costs, but given that 93 percent of Box\u2019s users are of the free variety, they are not an insubstantial weight.<\/em><\/p>\n

So, of course, the question is who pays for all those free users? The article makes it clear: paying customers.<\/p>\n

Now, to be fair, ownCloud has millions of free users as well \u2013 including organizations with 10\u2019s and even 100\u2019s of thousands of users. The ownCloud Community Edition is often a great test bed for companies before they move to our Enterprise Edition \u2013 which has added enterprise-specific features, greater testing and hardening and other attributes. But unlike Box, and other cloud vendors who\u2019s business model is actually selling storage, these Community users actually benefit ownCloud greatly. Often, these \u201cusers\u201d give us terrific feedback, bug fixes, extensions, features, translations and more. So, rather than carrying our \u201cfree users\u201d on our books as a marketing expense and charging our pay customers to carry them, our community of users actually helps support each other and our Enterprise customers.<\/p>\n

We like that equation, and our users and customers \u2013 both Community and Enterprise \u2013 seem to like it too.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And the question is who pays for all those free users?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":78665,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/owncloud.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/owncloud.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/owncloud.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owncloud.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owncloud.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/owncloud.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9416\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owncloud.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/owncloud.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owncloud.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owncloud.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}