We recently showed one of our new online safety websites to a group of our stakeholders and at the end someone asked how much we were going to charge people for the service. I proudly answered, “Nothing”

When I started at NetSafe, we were at the beginning of a process of shifting a lot of our training material online. I had the idea that when were able to provide training to people at anytime, from anywhere, that we would be able to charge people for the privilege, and that our training services would become self sufficient. It wasn’t to be.

A large part of the problem seemed to be that payment was often a bit of a barrier to access. How would we take the payments, what if the user didn’t have access to a credit card, how do you manage the process of raising invoices and tracking payments before giving a user access? All of these hurdles led to the conclusion that it is better to provide the service for free, and look for another way to cover the costs.

And that is where we sit now, quite happily until I read Mark Cuban’s blog titled ‘When you succeed with Free, you are going to die by Free’ which chronicles the problems for online organisations that become successful with a commercial model that is based on everything being free to users. It got me thinking.

While NetSafe doesn’t have the pressure to remain on top or be number one, we might have a free conundrum of our own. Are we susceptible to the idea that advice you pay for is better than the advice you get for free?

If you go to a Telco to get an audit on your companies internet use, you are likely to get advice on which of their plans to switch too. If you hire a consultant to carry out that audit you are going to get a wider scope of solutions. Which one is better for your company? Which one are people more likely to trust? In my experience, people often feel better about advice that they paid for.

So how do we help change peoples opinion of what we offer from freemium to premium without charging in the process? Part of that comes from understanding who we are as an organisation, the stakeholders that stand behind NetSafe, the organisations that contribute financially and philosophically to what we do. They are covering the costs, they are helping to make it happen, because they value a well educated, confident cybercitizen.

The second part of the equation lies in the fact that we are a research driven organisation, and so the input and feedback of those using our services contributes in no small way to our next project, our next initiative, and to our understanding how cybersafety education should be.

Together, that’s a great return on investment for us. So next time you use a NetSafe service, enjoy the free lunch.