Giving something away for free is easy. Making money on free is hard. Here are a few companies that are doing it right.

On The Web

Mail Chimp

MailChimp has a gazzilion competitors in the hosted email marketing space. They make their free plans (2,000 contacts) crazy huge. The switching costs of a hosted email provider are pretty high – attract people to your free plan, get them hooked, and make them pay when they are more successful.

Keep in mind that MailChimp is funded and I bet their spam monitoring team is quite big.

WordPress

WordPress.com/.org and other popular open source products – WordPress has done a great job creating the best blogging platform and the best part is that you can self host a copy of WordPress for free. A few years back they launched wordpress.com a hosted version of WordPress for $15/mo – perfect for non techies or people that don’t want to deal with the server headaches. Also a great way to leverage their extremely strong brand name, “WordPress”.

Free Credit Report

FreeCreditReport.com – They ask for your credit card info so they can check your credit score. They then auto-enroll you into a $14.95/mo plan so you can monitor your credit score. Is this super scammy? Yes. If you choose to do something like this – get ready for a ton of angry customers and chargeback fees. I decided to add them to this list because they just added a big banner at the top notifying people of this AND they are a good free service for checking your credit score.

DropBox

DropBox is one of my favorite companies that is doing Free right. They use their “Free” plan as a way to get new customers. First they offer a very generous 2GB storage “Free” plan and they let you earn more free space for every friend you successfully refer.

In Physical Retail Stores

Ben & Jerry’s

Ben & Jerrys – Where is your local Ben & Jerry’s? I had no idea until Free Cone Day happened. I google map’ed it and went. Now I know exactly what route to take to remedy my sweet tooth.

Apple

Apple’s Free Engraving – When you engrave someones name on the back of an Ipod you can no longer sell it on eBay. The value decreases. I mean who is going to buy my IPod with the engraving “Stud Muffin”. “By offering free engraving, Apple makes these used devices less valuable to other consumers. Who wants a weird engraving chosen by the previous owner on his iP*d?” – Eli Douardo

On Television

Snuggie

Snuggies and All Infomercials – “But wait, there is more”. Technically they aren’t giving you anything for free but they act like it. If you buy the product today you get a bunch of extra free stuff which gets the customer thinking that they are getting something for free.

Conclusion: If you are going to give something away for free, make sure you know how to earn money from it.

Do you offer a free product or plan? Let me know if it is working for you and how.