Who are the members of the civil service?

We have a freemium service and 20% of our members pay. Are we awesome, or is something wrong?

• We are getting about 30 paid members / month, 150 new members, total 3000 members, approx active members = 1500. So I feel justified in claiming that 20% of our members upgrade and pay. I read somewhere that if you have a freemium service and more than 5% pay, something might be wrong. But sometimes such things don't apply to your business. Our site is a type of photgraphy publishing platform.

• Answer:

  Something is "wrong".  You don't really have a freemium service, which relies on a high volume of free users -- instead, you have a web service with a free trial disguised as a free edition.  (Not that's there's anything wrong with that). Conversion rates should be very high in the early days, because only customers with a very high need will find you, and since they have a very high need, they'll convert at a high rate.  As you grow -- if you grow quickly -- your conversion rates will drop, until they then begin to crawl back up as you enter the mainstream phase.