Wednesday, December 5, 2012

YouMail Increases Focus On Revenues With New Changes

What's the hardest part of running a freemium business? When you've got to pull back your free features, in order to make sure those free accounts don't overwhelm your resources. That's the lesson being learned by YouMail this week, as the firm announced that it would be changing some of its free services. YouMail, which offers up both free and paid, enhanced voicemail services, said it is no longer supporting SMS alerts in its free service, adding more advertising, and making other changes to better cover the cost of its free accounts. YouMail said today that the features were moved to its new, premium service, YouMail Business Edition--but that some of its users haven't been very happy with the move. The company explained that it made the changes to make the free service self-sustaining for its nearly 4 million free account, so that those accounts will cover the costs of offering it; among the issues driving the change was apparently the rising cost of sending SMS messages. YouMail's service lets users set up personalized voicemail, transcribe their voicemail messages, get text alerts when people receive a voicemail, and much more.