A few weeks ago I wrote about The Downside of Free Apps.  I pointed out how it can be difficult to get customer support in a timely fashion sometimes if you are a user of a free app. 

It’s not that I am against free stuff.  On the contrary, say the word “free” and I’m salivating just like one of Pavlov’s best puppies.  In fact, it would have been a lot more expensive to start my business had I not had the use of so many wonderful free online apps.

But now that my small business has gotten legs and is moving past the startup stage, I really have to think long and hard about whether I can continue to run the business when some of my key business tools are free.  Maybe, just maybe, that’s being penny wise and pound foolish.  Perhaps opting for that upgraded paid account is the least risky and least expensive option, after all.  Then if I encounter a problem, at least I’ll have the chance to get real customer service to fix it.

That thought brings me around to a blog post on The Official Google Blog by Matthew Glotzbach, Product Management Director, Google Enterprise. He makes a pretty significant announcement, noting that Google is now guaranteeing 99.9% uptime for all its enterprise Apps (Premier Apps), including GMail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk:

Today, we’re announcing that we will extend the 99.9 percent service level agreement we offer Premier Edition customers on Gmail to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. We have been delivering high levels of reliability across all these products, so it makes sense to extend our guarantees to them.More than 1 million businesses have selected Google Apps to run their business, and tens of millions of people use Gmail every day. With this type of adoption, a disruption of any size — even a minor one affecting fewer than 0.003% of Google Apps Premier Edition users, like the one a few weeks ago — attracts a disproportional amount of attention. We’ve made a series of commitments to improve our communications with customers during any outages, and we have an unwavering commitment to make all issues visible and transparent through our open user groups.

Google is one of the 1 million businesses that run on Google Apps, and any service interruption affects our users and our business; our engineers are also some of our most demanding customers. We understand the importance of delivering on the cloud’s promise of greater security, reliability and capability at lower cost. We are hugely thankful to our customers who drive us to become better every day.

This is a significant move by Google. I think it helps.

But you know what the biggest selling point to me is? It’s this line in the Google Apps for Business section on “Getting Help” where it says, “For one-on-one help troubleshooting critical issues, email and telephone support is available from the control panel.”

That’s what businesspeople really want — especially small biz owners and managers who don’t have an in-house tech staff to go to with tech issues. If an outage happens or our account is incorrectly disabled or unusable, we want to be able to call someone at the app provider. We don’t want to have to pay our contract tech help $100/hour to try to troubleshoot the issues and end up with an unexpected bill for $500. And we’re busy and don’t have extra time to go over to discussion boards and compose questions and see if someone who actually knows what they’re talking about will answer you (without insulting you for your supposed stupidity, which sadly happens all too frequently at the Google User Groups).

We want to be able to make it someone else’s priority to fix.

And that is the real reason to go for paid apps, instead of free ones, in your business.