Why would Livelink-Experts.com provide this service for free when it is clearly a lucrative revenue stream for others? If this is so valuable why wouldn't you charge for the service? And how can you afford to provide it for free?

Well the truth is that the free service is but a small fraction of the value that a premium account can bring and we are certain that once you've tried our tools for a while you will want to upgrade to the very reasonably priced subscription to the community. Also, many of our paying members are independent contractors, consultants, and small businesses who are able to add great value to these free tools with their own expertise, experience, and knowledge. We can provide these tools to you and offer advice as to how to best use them, however we cannot and do not pretend to be a replacement for skilled experts; these experts want to promote themselves to you and while ensuring your privacy is intact, Livelink-Experts.com uses the information to let you know about the current membership that have the skills and expertise your performance data suggests you need. So in essence, this service is a promotional loss-leader.

Livelink-Experts.com is a commercial web site, however, and so we do advertise to our free account members using the typical pop-up ads and chicklets you've undoubtedly become used to but the difference here is that all the ads come from other members of Livelink-Experts.com. This allows you to see their business relationships as well as their GATE Trust Score, vetting them as potential suppliers before you even talk to them. Premium account holders have the option of turning off all advertisements.

You do not need a license to use these tools and you don't have to pay anybody to understand how to, the interface is intuitively easy and all the steps are linked together dynamically such that the learning curve is almost flat.

Finally, with the rich Usage Profile Scenario descriptions applied to the Usage Profile Datasets Livelink-Experts.com has the ability to actually determine Usage Profile Fingerprints for specific Open Text applications and solutions. We do believe that the aggregate information will be valuable in and of itself and Livelink-Experts.com may well actively sell/rent/lease or otherwise accept payment for access to the aggregated information. Under NO circumstances will Livelink-Experts.com willingly provide any identifying information about you or the company or companies you represent without your explicit authorization.

We believe the above is compensation enough for the community and it's paying members so really, there is no catch.