Over that past year a number of ‘freemium’ services have been limited or removed. (Freemium is a method of selling web based apps where you get a basic version for free, and pay to upgrade for more features). Just recently Google, change the terms of is free version of Google Apps to include 10 users instead of 50 users.  Other freemium apps have been eliminated as well. (QuickBooks Simple Start online, and Working point also eliminated freemium in the past 12 months) .

Freemium apps have been a boon to small businesses, because you could get a basic set of functionality at no cost. In most cases the free version had most, if not all, the functionality you needed at a great price –free. If it was missing something, in a lot of cases you could work around it.

There are a lot of quality freemium apps out there, and thats the problem; of all of the freemium apps that I currently use, or that I have used (probably about a dozen),  I have only upgraded one of them to a paid version. That means that these companies are support infrastructure, security, and features for me, and not getting paid for it. With a conversion rate like that, I suspect that you will see less and less fremium services in the future.