Talk:Freemium

I find it stupid that the article starts off defining freeium with a LINK to a similarly unusual word "portmanteau" ,rather than simply call it a "blend of words". This type of obfuscation drives Wikipedia fans nuts. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.70.14.138 (talk) 20:49, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

Is it Shareware?

How is this different from normal shareware products? 89.14.198.9 (talk) 11:13, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Just a new name for an old idea. "Shareware" is out, "freemium" is in. "Shareware", however, has a more limited connotation, mainly just involving software. "Freemium" can also refer to services on the web... which in a technical sense, is also software, it's just software that you're using over the web, rather than actually possessing the software. "Freemium" probably would have been a more accurate term from the beginning, but it was invented more recently and just "took off" in the past year or so. Sometimes I think "they" feel a need to invent new words for the same or similar things every now and then, just so those of us who have been around awhile can feel older and more out-of-touch. Sort of like, before 2010, if a politician did something that made him/her "look bad", that's what the media said: It looks bad, or it's "bad public relations." Now, however, it's "bad optics." Same wine, new bottle. Neutron (talk) 22:22, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

This section is a few years old, but further clarification may be needed. "Shareware" was a distribution model for software, primarily in the pre-internet days, although I believe that it is still in limited use. In lieu of convincing major software publishing houses to package a developer's product (especially a small, unknown developer) the developer would "share" it via online bulletin boards, or other means, and ask users who liked the product to voluntarily register and send in a donation to help offset the development costs. In some cases, but not all, developers would incentivize such registration by offering a premium version of the product, or paper manuals, or some other item of value. The name came from the fact that developers would often ask users to "share" the basic program with others, and provided a "license" allowing this. Terms of the license usually required that only the original program, the license, and other files that came with the program could be shared, not the premium items, and that the person sharing it could not charge for the software, although a small "disc copying" fee was sometimes permitted. This is not quite the same as "freemium" products, where the files for the software are obtained exclusively through approved sources (such as app stores or the web sites of the various companies involved). For comparison, one example of a "freemium" game is "The Simpsons Tapped Out" where players use two currencies within the game. One currency is "dollars" which are earned in-game, are plentiful, and are used for common items; and the other currency is "donuts" which can be earned, albeit very slowly, but can also be purchased using real money. Donuts can be used to speed up tasks, and to purchase certain exclusive "premium" items. Players who do not purchase donuts can save the free donuts they earn until they have enough to purchase any item that is available, but they will never be able to earn enough donuts to purchase all of the available items, given that many items are released on a limited-time basis and the player would need to have saved donuts for quite some time before the item was even announced in order to have enough donuts to purchase it -- meanwhile passing on other limited-time items. The player who does choose to purchase donuts can collect every item he or she desires, with the possible exception of limited-time items that were released before that player started playing the game. As an alternative to traditional software distribution models, both "shareware" and "freemium" distribution have been used for games, utilities, business software, etc. Etamni (talk) 05:14, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Emerging Trends

One variation of the freemium model is used by not-for-profit organizations in the social enterprise or social innovation business model. In this case, the feature-limited free tier of software is provided to an organization as a service to promote social transformation.

Paid tiers with premium features are also available. The revenue stream from the premium tiers is then used to sustain the nonprofit business in order to continue to provide free tiers for all organizations interested in using the software as a service (SaaS). This type of SaaS enterprise has therefore coined the term Software as a Profound Service (SaaPS) as it seeks to change the world for the better through enabling software. --BlueMonkeySailing (talk) 15:55, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

References

What category does this go to,

Some games such as pokemon shuffle limits the gameplay by having a "counter" (as hearts) system of number of stages you can play (including stages you've already completed). If it is below a certain amount (such as 5), it will slowly regenerate based on the real time clock (like 30 minutes). If that counter is exhausted, the player have to either pay or wait till it goes to at least 1. To speed up this timer to allow continuous gameplay, you have to pay to raise that counter to continue playing.Joeleoj123 (talk) 18:25, 10 May 2017 (UTC)

Does this goes to Time or bandwidth limited? The word time limit means the longest time allowed to do something.

Wiki Education assignment: Writing Arguments About STEM

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 5 January 2026 and 22 March 2026. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): HiddeneRX65 (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Gertr11, Redlobster85273.

— Assignment last updated by User0116 (talk) 21:39, 28 March 2026 (UTC)