There are 3 Basic Business Model Archetypes

When people bring up business models, they often use a whole bunch of terms like: software as a service (SaaS), enterprise, retail, e-commerce, ad-based, freemium, viral, social, not-for-profit, marketplace, etc.

The reason we end up with dozens of business model descriptors is that we attempt to label the myriad of combinations of how a business model creates, delivers, and captures value.

For instance, the difference between a SaaS, Enterprise, and Opensource business model is how they deliver and capture value. Even within a SaaS business model, one could implement a freemium or trial-based pricing model.

Trying to create a list of business model types gets complex pretty fast.

Instead categorize business model types by the number of actors (or customer segments) in the model.

Using this approach, you find there are just 3 basic business model archetypes that can describe any type of business: direct, multi-sided, and marketplaces (which are a special variant of multi-sided..