Adam Kalsey uses Atomz's free search engine on his site. He recently ran up against the company's 500-page limit for free search engines and complained (on the site, natch) that the next step up was a $15,000 service.
Turns out that the free service is a sort of legacy app, Kalsey writes. Like many dot-coms, Atomz started off by offering a free service in the hopes users would like it enough to upgrade to a paid version. But they didn't. To survive, Atomz changed its focus from trying to sell to small to mid-sized companies to offering industrial-strength search tools to enterprises.
"When most companies do this, they notify all their free customers that they are discontinuing the service. Sometimes they suggest alternative services, but many times the just kick their free users to the street corner. What Atomz decided to do was different. Even though there is no legitimate business case for doing so, they continued to allow existing customers to use their free service. They also grandfathered in all their paying customers and continue to provide them services at their existing pricing levels."
And with 60,000 of them, that's no insubstantial cost in servers and bandwidth, he notes.
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