Constantly providing something for free, its not normal (until now)

When you get offered something for free do you start feeling uncomfortable, looking for the fishhook?

For me it depends, if its a Software as a Service app, there are so many that are offered for free these days, its a new norm, so i’m happy to take it (understanding i’m helping them build a company they will sell, or they are selling my information to somebody else to fund it)

If I get a phonecall at home offering something for free, or offered something as I walk down the street, not so much.

When was the last time your IT provider reduced what they were charging you without you asking (as compared to increasing the cost by CPI each year)?

As a customer of Amazon Web Services (AWS) that is exactly what the are doing.  Every couple of months we get an email telling us they are reducing what they are charging us next month, compared to what they charged us last month.  No change in service, SLA etc

And we are not talking a 1-2% drop.

Here is an example where they dropped the cost of EBS storage by 50%:

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2014/01/aws-update-new-m3-features-reduced-ebs-prices-reduced-s3-prices.html

AWS are in a race to be the primary cloud infrastructure in the world.  They are racing Google, Microsoft and a few other contenders (IBM, Rackspace etc).  As they scale their servers and services they obviously gain economies of scale.

Now they could retain the savings, but they don’t they pass them on.  And its not just AWS, Microsoft Azure are reducing their costs to match AWS as well.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2014/01/24/storage-price-match.aspx

So the new norm seems to be providing free-mium SaaS apps and reducing your prices whenever you can, as a customer I love both of them!