TrialPay, getting paid for your Free software

Posted by Paul B | August 16, 2007 .

A little note about this turned up in my Inbox yesterday and for once I read it instead of just binning it as spam. I’m glad I did. Plenty of people will ask what makes you an authority on something, “why do you consider yourself an expert?” When it comes to making money from the internet my answer is always the same, my niche is free software and I’ve done very well out of it. I’m not a millionaire, the reason being the word FREE, if I could have monetised the actual software then I would be, if I’d charged just $1 each time somebody downloaded my software I’d have been able to retire 3 years ago with 3 million+ in the bank. I’d be pulling in $1500 a day from 1 website alone. It was never an option for me , what started as free shall always be free, I see it as some sort of loyalty to those who have stuck with me over the years. I earn money around my software, not from it. Well thanks to TrialPay that could all change.

TrialPay in simple terms is a new checkout system, but instead of charging for your products (like my free software) it gives them for free. Ok, so how do I make money from this? In order to download your product for free the customer will be shown some offers and trials from some of the biggest brand name companies out there (ebay as just one example). For doing this the advertiser, ebay for example, will pay you an amount of money. You get paid, the customer gets your free product for free. Sounds too good to be true? TrialPay has some very serious backing, some of the backers behind Skype, Google, and Akamai to name just a few. Their idea is simple, to pay for one product by trying or buying something else. It did take a little setting up but I’m good to go now on a couple of products so will report back in a week or so to let everybody know how I got on.

If you deliver any service or product for free at the moment it will be well worth giving it a go, after all what have you got to lose? You can sign up for your free merchant account at TrialPay here.

Social Sharing: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.