Legal Commentary

SiteProbe Goes For-Pay

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

The Internet gives us lots of free stuff. But someone has to pay the bills. Now SiteProbe, a service that checks if your web site is up or if there's some trouble that needs looking into, has announced its days (in my case, years) of free-as-in-beer are soon to be history. From the email:

Recently we reviewed the viability of our service and as a result made a few tough decisions. The biggest of these decisions was a change in our basic business model. Due to increased economic pressures, SiteProbe will no longer be a free service. Some of you may have already noticed changes on the home page of our website that spells out a 90 day free trial, with a price after that for the basic service. A somewhat simpler pricing structure can now be seen on our “Upgrades” page.

As a current user, your free account has been converted to a free trial account that expires on December 31, 2010. The URLs of expired accounts are not monitored, but their log data may still be viewed.

Trial accounts may be upgraded to paid accounts at any time.

If you already have upgraded your account, its expiration date will not change. Be aware that if you have upgrades, but have not upgraded your “trial” URL, that URL will cease to be monitored but your upgrades will continue.

I can't blame them for wanting to make ends meet. And once or twice it's been very useful. But I'm not sure if I want to pay $18/year for checks at 15 minute intervals either to this blog, or to Jotwell. Well, maybe for Jotwell….

Full post as published by Discourse.net on September 21, 2010 (boomark / email).