[hsuresh]

First of all, i don't know enough about your service and target market, so take this with a grain(actually, plenty) of salt.

Since you have a beta ready, first get a handful of customers pay and get value from your service. This is to iron out any issues that you might not have thought about. Most importantly, it will also validate if your target customers will really pay. Think of this as a dry run. Zero marketing.

Next up, is to take this from handful of customers to say, a bucketful of customers. I am guessing you can do this again, without much trouble, given you know about your target audience. This might be a good time to put up a website and include pricing details.

As to how you should market your service, you don't have to necessarily spend it on ads. You can try to reverse engineer marketing (aka growth hacking). I blogged about it here:http://goo.gl/zVw0Hd).

[submarine]

Are you saying I let them use it for free, iron stuff out, and then ask them to pay to continue using the service?

I expect issues. The service has a pretty long, horizontal and vertical series of steps to complete. I don't know if I can make them pay what I expect and have them experience something awful.

[hsuresh]

Nope, actually do everything to get the first few to pay. Once you do that, you can at least be certain that there are people willing to pay for your service/product. You can focus on growing your customer base after your paying customers give you great feedback.

[submarine]

Seems like a bold move. I feel like if I tried doing that, I'd get requests for refunds and a lot of bad press. But I guess your point is that at least I'd have to learn why, and then fix that for my next trial.

[hsuresh]

Why do you think it is a bold move? Since you have a handful of customers in the beginning, things can never get out of control. Even if your customers don't like the service/product, you can still do something about it - you cannot do it if there are hundreds.