There's more startups charging consumers now than anytime I can remember. It used to be that unless your startup was retail based, it was free. Those days are gone.
The unfortunate truth is that big companies can play that game - this or that is free and commoditizing software in general - they can win elsewhere. A very good example is what Google is doing with browsers and all kinds of software just to win on AdWords/Sense.
The bad news is that small companies cannot do that easily - they typically rely on a single product/service that they need to charge people for, like any traditional business out there.
Same with app stores - they are pretty much forcing 3rd party devs to give away or sell for pennies. Sure, we get this occasional story of a successful mobile product, but the truth is for each success there are tens of thousands of apps making close to nothing.
This, for me, is NOT a good trend for software startups. The whole "free" movement make it exceedingly hard to sell software nowadays.
At the same time that OSS makes software unsellable, it also makes SaaS profitable. For example it's becoming really tough to sell version control software but totally feasible to sell a version control service, in both cases because of excellent OSS software.
Surely ye jest.
There's more startups charging consumers now than anytime I can remember. It used to be that unless your startup was retail based, it was free. Those days are gone.