Something Interesting is Happening at Gizmo's Freeware [1]

Something interesting is happening at Gizmo’s Freeware. We are going to start reviewing a limited number of paid software products.

No, we are not changing the focus of the site nor are we going “commercial.” Our principle focus will remain free products just as it has always been.

The move to adding some paid software has been prompted by three factors:

First, there are many excellent mobile apps that cost a tiny amount of money, some as little as 99 cents. For many people these low cost apps are perceived to cost so little as to be free. It makes no sense to exclude them from our site particularly when the quality of some of these low cost apps is class leading.

Second, some of the best software programs in a given class are paid products. If I look at my own computer there are several products I’ve bought because I feel they do a better job than any free product. Most of us are in the same position –we own at least one commercial program or app.

Given this fact, it would be hypocritical for us to proclaim that free software is always best and also unethical for us to be aware of a superior paid product yet not tell our readers about it.

The third and final factor is that many of our readers want us to review commercial products. I know this because of the dozens of emails I’ve received over the years. Mostly these emails argue along the following lines: “Gizmo I love free stuff but sometimes I just want the best even if costs extra. Why don’t you give me some options and let me decide whether the extra features are worth the money.”

We are not going to have reviews of commercial software in all categories. Instead we will only have commercial reviews for categories where we believe that there are paid products that are better than their freeware equivalents. I expect this to be a limited number.

To kick off this process I’ve written a set of reviews for commercial VPN services and we hope to have this online this week. I’ve used a commercial VPN myself for the last two years because I could find no free VPN that provided the features and level of service I wanted. Based on my own experience I’m sure this new set of VPN reviews will be really useful to our readers as well.

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