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>>> Show me a (useful) website that costs less than $5 for lifetime access.

The business model is often completely different for the web. We pay with our eyeballs (ads) and our thoughts (click data).

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Nice. So that pretty much guarantees that only those SAAS apps that are operated by the largest corporations, and that harvest your personal data most efficiently, are the ones that dominate. Everything else is only that much more likely to disappear in an instant, taking with it not only all your documents, but the app's functionality itself as well. I really don't know what people like you are smoking.

I only smoke weed. But yes, outside of fairly niche markets, the largest corporations are dominating (Amazon AWS, Google Docs). It IS a lot more likely that any of these alternatives (http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-great-alternatives-to-google-...) will disappear with all your data than that Google Docs will. I'm not saying it's some awesome thing that big businesses can out price the little guys and I'm not saying that the profitable SAAS does not exist (Harvest, Github (most of Github's users don't pay a dime)). The simple reality is that most people get a fair amount of utility from free web services.

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