What's The Value of a Free App?

Marco Arment has a great post on why he stopped offering the free “lite” version of Instapaper and may never bring it back.

Only people who buy the paid app — and therefore have no problem paying $5 for an app — can post reviews for it. That filters out a lot of the sorts of customers who will leave unreasonable, incomprehensible, or inflammatory reviews. (It also filters out many people likely to need a lot of support.)