I pay for products that prove valuable to me, for which there is no reasonable free alternative. By the way, CutePDF will create PDFs for you.

For example, I bought NetNewsWire when I got my Mac, even though there were alternatives. Of course that is now free too.

Aidan: Good point, although I would also suggest really useful/valuable services such as Wordpress should be able to get people to cough up a small fee each month.

My opinion is that people are willing to pay for online apps that facilitate the revenue-generation process, or - simply put - help them make money.

Apps the like 37signals suite remove many hassles and streamline the work process. Having such systems in place can improve efficiency significantly. In other words, the ROI is high. There is a case to be made.

Also keep in mind that you can’t count on reliability and support for free apps…

Cheers,
Aidan
http://www.MappingTheWeb.com

1. The cost itself
2. The transaction process.

In regards to the cost it’s not as simple as you might think. If the price is above free, but still “too low” then people will actually be LESS inclined to pay than if it were higher. That is people would be more willing to pay $5/month for an RSS feed instead of $1. But if you charge $10/month that’d be too much. I’m just pulling these numbers out of thin air, but you get the idea.

Then there’s the actual transaction itself, which is related to the cost. If I’m only paying a dollar, is it really worth my time to pull out my credit card and go through that 5-10 minute process? Not really. If there was some sort of universal payment mechanism that made it stupidly easy one-click pay kind of thing, then people would be FAR more likely to spend. Even things like PayPal and Google Wallet are too much of a pain. I’m talking about going to an blog, clicking on the subscribe button and a pop-up saying “Pay $10 for this feed” You hit yes, and that’s it.

Of course if people are paying for feeds they’re going to expect a certain level of commitment out of the writer. I don’t want to pay money and then have the blogger get sick and not write for a week or two.

Are bloggers willing to put up with that level of commitment?