Free sounds great. Who doesn’t love free stuff? Who can say how many random and unnecessary calories I’ve consumed at parties or at those in-store sample stands. Goodness knows I have wasted a lot of hours online that never would have happened if I had to assess the value I was getting from it. (Of course, someone made money from that time I contributed).
But free is never free, it’s only subsidised, whether that’s by others, by ourselves indirectly, or even by the earth. In a system of capitalism, free things made with someone’s labour lead to unsustainability and poor motive alignment, even if they result from the best intentions. Instead, we could think about products as either coming from collective investment with collective and equitable ownership, like public goods, or we should have models in which there is value exchange, even if we eliminate some of the regressive nature of flat pricing models. If we’re taking things from the earth, we might imagine how we can reciprocate, not just take and use.
With tech, we’re making products that are intangible, but they still require labour to produce. When we make them “free,” we are in a situation where we’re going to be dependent on money that isn’t tied to the value we’re creating for the people who use our products. And yet, we’re working in a context where many companies, especially in the social tech world, make their products free.
Free feels like it’s generous, until you’re out of funding. Free suggests there’s no needs among the people who are working on the product. And free feels like it’s a commitment to some kind of ethical stance and cooperation (see Open Source philosophies) but Open Source is rife with abandoned projects, projects with only one real contributor, and tools that mostly just serve developers. It leaves out creating the kind of relationships that emerge when people exchange energy for value. It leaves out creating systems of mutual benefit.
I’ve worked on products where we offered free versions. It’s great for growth and for giving people a sense of what value they might find by making a commitment. There’s room for free, but something interesting to me is how much less responsibility people felt when using the product for free. They often didn’t value the work of the people making the product at all, and were more antisocial in their communications with the company.
There’s a real and interesting tension in how to approach charging for technology, especially social tech. As a person who does lean to the cheapskate side, I like to ask myself, for the products I pay for, what are my feelings versus free products? Much of my thinking has to do with user experience, especially collective user experience. It makes sense to me to pay for things that allow me to extend a good experience to others. I suspect that there needs to be a re-norming if we want to create sustainable companies around social and collaborative technologies. For now, most of these make money by offering a business product. Perhaps that’s the right transitional path, as long as we don’t lose our missions along the way.