I was reading a post by Fred Wilson the other day titled In defense of free. For you non tech folks that read my blog, Fred Wilson is one of the most influential investors in technology.

As I was reading his post though, I realized that many of the things he views as "free" I simply view as something that you pay for with a currency other than dollars.

Services commonly referred to as "free" such as Pandora, Twitter, Facebook and even TV shows, are all great and I use each of them almost every day in one form or another.

But I don't view them as free. I just pay for them in something other than dollars. And sometimes, the payment is way more valuable to the service provider than money.

When you listen to Pandora, you're paying for it with your attention by listening to ads. You pay Facebook by giving them the right to collect your personal information and web usage so they can service their advertisers more effectively. And when you use Twitter you're paying them with your attention so that they can possibly build a revenue model.

In each case, even though you're not paying with money, you are paying with something. I personally would love it if I could pay Facebook a nominal fee and not see any ads, have complete privacy, and not get tracked all over the web. Alas, that's not an option.

Just because something doesn't cost money doesn't mean it's free. So any time you sign up for a "free" service, ask yourself, what am I paying them with.

In every case, you are paying something.

If you follow my blog regularly, you know that we've been hard at work on a yoga studio software that helps independent yoga studios manage their students, class attendances, schedules, and all the other things someone needs to run a yoga studio.

From an engineering standpoint, we've done some really awesome things, from allowing instructors to find subs via text messaging, to deeply integrating with Stripe so that our customers can start taking credit cards in minutes.

But as we know, engineering is only half the battle.

And being a small Rails shop one of the things I've come to terms with is that while we've gotten quite good at designing page layouts, application flows, overall user experience, and making important decisions about what to put in and what to leave out of a product, we're not as good at bringing in what I'd call 'the shine' to a complex web application or it's marketing pages.

So, I enlisted the help of Rand Media Group, a small marketing and design company in Chicago. Disclaimer: they're run by my buddy Ryan Evans, and we happen to inhabit the same co-working space as well. Though, that should take nothing away from my praise.

Visually, the results are obvious. Our application was taken to the next level in that it had a much more polished feel, and the landing page did a great job not only of engaging site visitors, but also of telling the story of how we built this product after my wife opened her yoga studio.

But none of that would matter if our signups weren't improving. Luckily, they're even better than I had hoped for. We're converting new visitors into trial users at 4 times the rate we were previously, and they're far more engaged on the site when they do visit, visiting twice as many pages.

Check out the before and after below, and our site at www.tulasoftware.com. And if you're a startup in need of some design help, I can't recommend Rand Media Group enough.

Before and After