There are so many start-ups making interesting apps, tools and services that I cannot even consider making friends with them all. Aviary.com is one such company. I was told about it. I looked at it briefly. I was impressed. I forgot about it.

It wasn’t that it was too expensive – an annual subscription was only $25.00 or thereabouts. It was simply that it wasn’t absolutely essential, in the way that Dropbox and Evernote have so far proved to be. I say so far because there was a time – two years actually – when Remember The Milk was essential, until a rearrangement of my calendaring and note-taking meant that it suddenly wasn’t. I went from Pro User to non-user overnight.

So what is Aviary, that is interesting but not that interesting? It is a set of online editing tools that allow you to edit images, vector graphics, and sounds. The tools include a Firefox plugin that allows you to screen-grab directly into your Aviary library.

This week they have quietly announced that they are dropping their paid plans in favour of universal freedom. From now on all their tools will be free to use for everyone. No more paid accounts. And so on. The reasons they give for this are oddly opaque. They say:

As of today, we have decided to make using Aviary’s suite of editing tools FREE for everyone.

At Aviary, we believe that everyone in the world should have access to powerful creation tools. We therefore chose our company mission to be We make creation accessible to everyone. Our powerful set of tools helps fulfill this mission by enabling small businesses, students, artists & creators across different genres.

As a business, we did need to bring in revenues to cover our costs and development and to accomplish this we created a tiered pricing plan for certain types of uses. Although this was financially successful for us, the side effect of this was that our tools and their features (in their full capacity), were not truly accessible to everyone.

We have long felt that to better serve our core mission our complete feature set needed to be in the hands of everyone – not just those who could afford it. Fortunately, our recent round of funding (by Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions & others) enables us to finally achieve this goal as we shift revenues to other areas that don’t limit individuals in any way. We are excited at the opportunity to stay true to our mission. Not many companies are so fortunate.

What does this mean? They are going to “shift revenues to other areas that don’t limit individuals in any way”, by …..Advertising? Selling white label versions of the tools to Yahoo or similar?

I am genuinely interested to find out what this does mean, especially as they go on to hint that new tools are arriving soon, which seems to indicate that this is not just a carefully managed retrenchment. I will subscribe to their blog and watch with interest.

And in the meantime their full toolset is now free and, if I have to edit online, my previous look suggests that I would far rather use Aviary than Photoshop.com or anything else.