Five days ago, Tumblr ran into some downtime because of problems with their web host, Rackspace. While the service disruptions were minimal and the problems were completely out of his control, Tumblr creator David Karp was extremely apologetic about the slowness and outages.

As part of his apology on the Davidville blog, Karp offered compensation to Tumblr users:

To hopefully redeem some of your faith, we will be raising the Audio Upload limit to 10 megabytes (from 5), in addition to the already scheduled feature update due in a few days.

This is an amazing move by David and his team at Tumblr, particularly because Tumblr is a free service. While I agree that users should expect reasonable uptime from a web service, they should definitely not feel a sense of entitlement if they are let down by a service that isn’t charging them any money.

I will pay for Tumblr

What I’m trying to say, however, is that Tumblr should be charging me something to use their service to power Squandrous. I understand that David is determined to keep the Tumblr completely free, so in that light, I’m recommending he offer a paid version of the service to help offset some of the costs.

I would gladly pay a monthly or yearly fee for extra features like more storage space, easy incremental backups to my personal server (yeah, I’m worried about data loss everywhere I go), uptime guarantees, and search and archiving flexibility.

By giving the heavy Tumblr users the option to pay for some extra features that aren’t too resource-intensive, Davidville would be able to offset some of the costs from the free service, and also devote additional resources to making the basic service more robust. Sounds like a good idea to me, and I personally know quite a few people that would gladly be willing to throw a few bucks each month towards Tumblr.

I will pay for Twitter

First, my gripe: I’ve been using Twitter by SMS for months now, and there has never been any problems with the 200-300 SMS messages I was receiving every day. Three weeks ago, however, I received a message that I was now limited to 250 SMS messages a week, making Twitter almost completely unusable through my mobile phone.

My problems with downgrading a feature (without telling current users before instituting the change) aside, it seems as though the main reason for this new restriction is money:

Twitter doesn’t charge individuals for sending or receiving messages. In order to provide global messaging, Twitter negotiates with mobile operators and their representatives around the world for reasonable SMS fees. We do this so that folks can use Twitter in as many countries as possible. Until agreements are in place, however, we need to put in limits on the number of messages received per person.

The problem with that message is the first sentence: if Twitter doesn’t charge individuals for sending or receiving messages, maybe it should. I’d recommend keeping the 250 message limit for free users, and letting heavy SMS users pay a monthly fee for all the extra messages they will be sending and receiving over the month. Sounds simple to me.

I’d probably pay a bit extra for some uptime assurances as well — we all know Twitter has the reputation for being a bit finicky at times.

I will pay for what I use

The conclusion is simple: if I’m getting value out of a product or service, I’m more likely to support that same product or service financially. And I’m not the only one.

I admire companies that are determined to keep their services free, but in the end, you need to have some kind of revenue stream to ensure that the free service remains robust and fully-functioning. Flickr has proved that asking heavy users to subsidize the rest of the community — in return for added functionality and features — is a smart way to keep your finances in the black.

It’s about time that Tumblr and Twitter took that approach as well.