Stan Schroeder from Frantic Industries recently listed the Services he’d keep using if they weren’t free. His list was in response to Google’s announcement that Google Apps Premier Edition was being provided as a paid service. So it got me thinking about some free apps that I use on a regular basis that I would pay for if they were no longer free.

In the category of web-based services…

1. Wordpress - I’ve been a Wordpress user for almost two years now, and in my opinion it is the best of the three blogging tools I have used.
2. Google Reader - helps me manage and keep up-to-date with the 300+ feeds that I subscribe to. Being web based, I can check my feeds from any one of the three computers I use.
3. Pageflakes - My custom homepage/widget service. I find it easy to use and has a good selection of widgets that I find useful.
4. Feedburner - Serves all the feeds from this site and hundreds of thousands of others. On top of serving your feeds, they offer other great services like analytics, feed promotion and optimization.
5. Techmeme - One of the only sites I visit multiple times per day, it constantly satisfies my need for the latest and greatest technology related news.
6. PopUrls - An aggregator that lists top items from most of the popular content aggregation services like digg.com, del.icio.us and slashdot.
7. MXNA - Adobe has a great news aggregator that aggregates 1273 feeds from user’s of Adobe’s software. If you develop or design with Adobe software you can monitor specific products like Apollo, Flex and PhotoShop. Note - Adobe has a newer product called myFeedz. I haven’t used it too much yet, but find it to be not quite as targeted towards development as MXNA.
8. Text Link Ads - although technically not a free service, I have found that this service is the easiest service to help monetize a blog. In fact this service works so well, I wish I had started using it long ago!

In the category of free desktop software…

1. Aduim - (OSX only) I love this IM client! Handles most IM protocols and has some nice features for logging chats.
2. Firefox - (cross platform) Well I would probably never pay for a web browser, but if I really had to, Firefox would be my choice!
3. VLC Media Player - (cross platform) Even on the Mac, I have yet to find a video it couldn’t handle.
4. Aptana - (cross platform) If you do any AJAX development, you must check out this Eclipse based editor. Take a quick peek at their screencasts to quickly discover why this tool is so great.
5. Jungle Disk - (cross platform) A great client for backing up your data to Amazon’s S3 storage service (note - S3 is not free but is relatively inexpensive for online backup).
6. MediaFork - (cross platform) A simple tool for ripping DVD’s to MPEG-4. Ripped files can be played on your laptop or iPod.
   
7. MySQL GUI Tools - (cross platform) Very capable suite of cross-platform tools for working with MySQL databases.
8. The UnArchiver - (OSX only) My favorite free file compression tool. Has great integration with Finder and handles every compression format I have ever thrown at it.

So what would make your list? Please leave yours in the comments.

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