Freemium model
Freemium: Free, Free, Free, but not one hundred percent Free. Have you ever been reading a very interesting article to only get halfway through and see: “You must subscribe to continue reading”? This is the crutch of the freemium model. They draw you in for free and then in order to move further along you must pay.
Freemium
The Freemium model has been around since the 1980s, although the term Freemium came into use around 2006. The term was created by Jarid Lukin of Alacra. Freemium is a combination of the words free and premium. The freemium model is a business model where the product or service can be bought for free but in order to use other features you have to pay an additional cost. The freemium model comes in a variety of forms: video games, newspapers, storage sites like Dropbox, Amazon web services, etc.
- Video Games(see below)
- Dropbox
- Amazon
- Spotify
- Wistia
- MailChimp
- Box
- OneDrive
- Evernote
- SurveyMonkey
- Skype
- Hootsuite
- Buffer
- Join.me
Games
The most common form of a freemium product is a video game. You acquire a game for free but it comes with many features that require in app purchases. This can range from a unique skin change to upgraded weapons that are unavailable without paying. The latter is a reason that some freemium games are also called Free to Play; Pay to Win games. This is one of the main ethical issues when it comes to this model. Below is a list of freemium games.
- Clash of Clans
- Clash Royale
- League of Legends
- The Room Two
- Crashlands
- Fortnite
- Apex Legends
- Destiny 2
- Counter Strike: Global Offensive
- Dungeons and Dragons Online
- etc
Ethical Issues
The freemium model is open to a whole series of ethical issues. Beginning with that their products are advertised has free, but in reality most have a cost to actually using said product.
