Joining a growing list of dot-coms that are seeking to get money from users, Quickbrowse, a small South Beach company that has been praised from New York to Bangkok, has decided to start charging for its Internet service.

Founder and Chief Executive Marc Fest knows he's making a big gamble, ``but I'd rather have 1,000 paying customers than 100,000 nonpaying users.''

Quickbrowse allows surfers to combine all their favorite websites into one page that they can scroll down each day, clicking on those stories that interest them, which then can be displayed together in another scrollable page.

``A fetching idea,'' a New York Times columnist called the service earlier this month.

Starting Monday, Fest said, he will notify via e-mail his 40,000 regular users that, if they want to collate more than six web pages, they will have to start paying $12.95 for three months' service.

Users will have a week to make up their minds, Fest said. After that, they won't be cut off, but if they attempt to access a seventh web page, they will see a notice that they need to pay a fee.

``I'm joking to people it's part of your Quickbrowse-from-cradle-to-suc
cess-or-to-death series,'' Fest wrote in an e-mail.

Fest is backed by a well-known list of investors, including Andrew Tobias, a Democratic Party bigwig; meteorologist Bryan Norcross; and David Bohnett, the California Internet pioneer who founded GeoCities.

In the past few months, many other Internet companies have started charging for some services, desperately trying to stay afloat as online advertising dries up.

Salon.com, considered by many to be the top netzine, offers ``premium content'' for $30 a year. CBS Television and RealNetworks provide the three months of Big Brother 2 episodes on the web for $19.95. The Times of London plans to charge for online use of its famed crossword puzzles. And Dialpad.com, which used to offer free long distance around the world, is now charging for international connections.

It's too soon to see if enough surfers will pay to keep these online services going, but more websites are evaluating the possibility of fees.

``This is a theme we've seen with the larger Internet portals that is now trickling down to the smaller players,'' said David Joyce, an analyst with Guzman & Co. in Miami. ``The free business model isn't working, so they need to try something else. I think people will pay if it's something they need on an ongoing basis.''

Fest thinks users will pay if there aren't free alternatives. He points out that his major metabrowser competitors -- Octopus.com, Calltheshots.com and Onepage.com -- have switched business plans, aiming at providing programming services to other websites.

``Some of our competitors got 30 to 100 times more funding than we did,'' Fest said. ``We were lucky that we received less than $1 million. We didn't get enough to go on a crazy spending binge. We didn't hire 30 people, didn't get the fancy office, precisely because we couldn't afford it. We're like the little nutshell staying afloat on a stormy sea while all these big tankers sank.''

Fest and one programmer are the only full-time employees. Five part-timers are scattered in Sweden, Slovakia, Germany, Maryland and Massachusetts.

Fest said his costs are so low that he needs only 3,000 subscribers to break even. Even if he doesn't get them, he said, he has cash and other revenue for ``more than half a year'' of operation.

Fest sees subscriptions as only a temporary measure. His long-term goal, after the arduous patenting process for his programming is completed, is to sell out to Microsoft, so that users of Internet Explorer can simply click on a button to get their favorite sites gathered into one scrollable page.

``That's a logical step,'' Fest said hopefully.