Software and services — free or paid?

There are plenty of great free soft­ware appli­ca­tions and ser­vices avail­able on the Web.

In some cases, pay­ment removes adver­tis­ing and enables more fea­tures. Some require a sub­scrip­tion or a one-time pay­ment.Some­times the pay­ment is merely a dona­tion to a one-man oper­a­tion that wrote the code.

Here’s a few quick lists of what I’m using, inspired by this dis­cus­sion on Weblog Tools Col­lec­tion:

Keep in mind that my rec­om­men­da­tions are for the con­sumer or indi­vid­ual ver­sions of each ser­vice. Some prod­ucts are avail­able in cor­po­rate or enter­prise ver­sions for a fee.

Free soft­ware and ser­vices that I would pay for, along with links to each service’s “about” or home page:

• Craigslist, if only to get the spam and junk post­ings off the clas­si­fied por­tion of the service.
• del.icio.us, my sec­ond favorite social book­mark­ing ser­vice. I’m wait­ing to see what hap­pens to Yahoo, the com­pany that owns del.icio.us and also owns my next choice..
• Flickr, for the Pro account features.
• Google Earth, to get enhanced fea­tures on the Mac application.
• MacUp­date, for enhanced fea­tures on this Mac soft­ware update service.
• Pay­Pal, so I could have a busi­ness account.
• Skype, for unlim­ited calling.
• Stum­ble­Upon, my favorite social book­mark­ing ser­vice, to get some extra fea­tures as a sponsor.
• TextE­dit, my favorite text edi­tor for Windows.

Here’s a list of free soft­ware and ser­vices that I wouldn’t pay to use, because the ROI just isn’t that great:

• avast, my favorite virus scan­ner for Win­dows and Mac.
• Fire­fox, the best web browser for the Mac and Windows.
• Gmail, because the keep adding more stor­age space to my free accounts anyway.
• Twit­ter, a microblog­ging ser­vice that sup­ports SMS and a vari­ety of web and soft­ware clients
• Twit­terific, a Mac twit­ter client. I can live with the occa­sional ad.
• WinZip and other file com­pres­sion programs.
• Word­Press, the soft­ware I use to run the billso.com web site. It’s fab­u­lous, free, and there’s no real rea­son to pay for it. Many Word­Press devel­op­ers earn con­sult­ing income from clients who need

Tagged as: eBay, Google, mac, open-source, revenue, ROI, service, software, stumbleupon, Windows, Yahoo