On the "free" idea, our main principle is "give a leg up to the little guy", and we thought that one way of fulfilling that would be to enable people to have a place to sell their things that doesn't incur the heavy percentage that some of the marketplaces take. By using Paypal adaptive payments and Stripe Connect under the hood, we've managed to make it so that the processing doesn't even go through our bank account. So essentially Bitsy is a software service, rather than a payments processor. Much like other freemium models, there'd be opportunities to offer value elsewhere via pay-for services. That remains unproven.
out of curiosity: 1) why did you to price bitsy as free? 2) what are the future plans (features) for bitsy?
ps: bitsy blog is down.