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I feel that the author has a point, but only to a certain extent. There are also plenty of companies that focus on a great user experience and top not support. To provide some counter examples to the companies listed in the article, companies like 37signals or GitHub and many blossoming mobile game developers are executing on this very well, in my opinion.

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I agree.

Cloudkick did very well with a freenium model -- it let sysadmins try out our service on their personal machines -- and it led to many using it inside their businesses later.

Those kinds of conversions and upsells are the perfect reason for a B2B application to have a freenium model. It wasn't about getting users for investors, we just looked at it more like a loss-leader and part of our user acquisition costs -- just like the costs of buying Google Ads, etc.

Don't know if you can put 37 signals in there now, while they have free offerings they seem to do there best to make them only visible to those actively looking.

Fair enough, they do seem to hide any free offerings. They seem to fit well into the "building a fantastic product, charging for it, and offering great support" group.

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