Plaxo: OK free, not worth paying for

Plaxo is part social media tool, part address book. It’s a useful way of keeping contacts names and addresses up-to-date. Useful, but in my opinion not as elegant or as handy as alternatives such as Linkedin.

The company and its product have a chequered history. In the earlier days Plaxo messages would turn up in my email all the time. The looked like spam and were extremely annoying. The company climbed aboard the cluetrain and the unpleasant stuff stopped.

While I understand Plaxo needs to make money – don’t we all? I’m not sure the company’s current approach is going to work. It certainly doesn’t work for me.

Plaxo operates a so-called “Freemium” business model. The basic product is free, if you want to do more with the tools you have to pay. In theory it’s a good business model and there are many cases where it works well.

I’ve recently come across three ways Plaxo aims to get money from me. I don’t think I’d pay for any of these:

1. Outlook sync. This was free, with a paid-for version allowing more features. Now sync is part of Plaxo Premium and costs US$60 a year – around a NZ$100 give or take exchange rate fluctuation.
2. Then there’s Plaxo Pro available in three versions; Basic, Plus and Power. The Power version is a whopping US$250 a month and essentially provides you with a way to spam Plaxo members. It includes Premium.
3. Then there are e-cards, basically electronic birthday cards and similar stationary at a cost of US$20 a year.

You can forget the e-cards straight away. Why would I ever want to pay US$20 to send them? I’ve no need or inclination to spam people, which rules out Plaxo Pro. Which brings us to Plaxo Premium – paying for support is fair enough. Paying for the ability to back-up is reasonable. Paying to remove duplicates is a bit on the nose, but we’ll let that go. I can’t use the sync to Windows Mobile and I used the Sync to Outlook when it was free and was not overly impressed.

Plaxo is an OK online address book. It’s not a useful to me as Facebook or Linkedin. It has around 15 million users – Linkedin has 43 million, mainly business oriented users, Facebook has 300 million. Which one of those is the most valuable? Certainly not Plaxo.