Hi Pierre - SketchUp was not originally free - it only became free after it was purchased by Google and they wanted it to be used to generate content for Google Earth.

As you may be aware, Google is a mega-billion dollar company and so they are able to use their vast quantity of other income to offset anything like a reduction in income that would happen by giving away SketchUp for free.

On the other hand, I'm just a single person working on MoI - I don't have the billions and billions of dollars that Google has to work with, so the approach that Google uses for making its software free just simply does not apply to my vastly different situation.

So I do not plan on making a free MoI version available - in fact having a huge number of users who will all need a lot of help learning how to use the software and meanwhile not wanting to pay anything for it would actually be a very bad situation for me, I would basically have to withdraw from doing support and interacting with users directly myself as I do now.

It works far better for me to charge for MoI and to be able to work with people who can recognize its value enough to know that they're actually getting a bargain at its current price which is quite low in comparsion to the majority of CAD applications that are out there.

In the future at some point when things reach a certain maturity level, I might do a "lite" version that has some subset of functionality but even at that time I would not plan on it being free. The model of making it free just does not work well with the kind of business that I want to run, I actually much prefer having a smaller user base that I can interact more directly with.

I probably have more of the reverse problem - instead of making it free I should probably be charging more money for it than I am doing right now. The main reason I don't do that is to try and make it more accessible to artists who don't have a particularly big budget to spend on software. It's one of the things that has helped some people be able to get into using CAD to help with their artwork.

- Michael