Stop giving your product away for free
I feel like the market is getting ruined by people giving away their side projects for free. Because of a global and saturated market in which nowadays a lot of free alternatives can be found, it is getting harder to make money than it should be.
I noticed that a lot of my users expect my products to be free, although I have put so many hours into developing them. I find it hard to realize that they are happy spending many dollars in restaurants and bars, but find spending a few dollars on an app an issue. However, we are creating this problem ourselves and the fact that users are (unknowingly) selling their data instead of paying for services such as Facebook and Instagram, isn’t helping either.
We need to start learning to our users that developing software costs money and that it’s a normal thing to pay for it. Wouldn’t the world be more transparent too? Think of a Facebook without dodgy advertisement, selling of data, or privacy issues. I would happily pay for that. Wouldn’t you?
So, put a realistic price on your product. Don’t give it away for free. You deserve it and your competition too. Keep the market healthy.
Even when you’re doing it as a hobby and there’s no need to make money, think about others who do need to be able to feed their family. Also, think about the fact that giving away a product for free makes it less valuable by default. If putting a price on a product is a good way to validate an idea, and you give it away for free, how good is it really? And wouldn’t you be way more proud of what you’ve built if it also is a success on the business side of things?
What’s your opinion about all this? Are you bothered by the same issue?
PS. Not talking about free trials or free plans to have your users ultimately upgrade or spread the word so you can monetize their connections.
right, just wanted to add. just because it took you xyz amount of time building doesn't justify any price tag. My project www.browsegenres.com took me 600 hours but what now?
the user doesn't have to care how long it took me, that's my problem. He would just think, then you have to find a way to make things happen faster. Right.
Another thing often is the data. Back to my project again. I'm using the Spotify API so third party data. The way I connect my app to Spotify would allow me to monetize but as soon I ask for user's Spotify access I wouldn't be allowed anymore. So what now?
This discussion started in the music industry when artists began to give away songs for free in trade of getting more - or even at all - attention. And, they also were the first ones to justify a price tag as mentioned above.
The reality. The justification of price begins where there is a real value for your user. No matter if it's saving him time when using your product, convenience, ... whatever it is.
Secondly, one price fits all would actually be wrong. Another good example is music again. Image, you just discovered a new song or a new artist. You like this song so much, it could "drive you crazy". First reaction might be you simply need to tell your friends. That's why we have the "share" buttons. And, imagine, the artist asked you to help him financially. So, which amount would you spend since this one song is of such high (emotional) value TO YOU? Whereas, for example, you ask one of your friends to spend some money as well but he doesn't care at all. He wouldn't even consider a dime.
Giving away something for free doesn't change the game anymore. Everybody does it. There is simply too much out there, we are fed up with it. But what's limited is our time, since we only have 24 hours. And everybody is competing for our small daily window of minutes, or 1-2 hours.
Yes, free usage, timely based or feature based is fine. Users will pay for it afterwards once they realized your goods value for them.
As a founder—no, as a human being—you always have two choices: (a) ask the world to change for you, or (b) focus on what you have the power to change.
Choose the second option every time. The first is a recipe for failure and frustration.
In this case, what you have the power to change is your own business. If you're building in a commoditized space, offering something of commoditized value… stop doing that. Go back to the drawing board, and figure out what you can provide of distinct value that people will pay for despite all of the random free stuff that exists in the world.
So I agree with the advice to stop giving away your product for free.
Not because it's destroying the ecosystem or affecting other founders. That shouldn't be your concern. It's their responsibility to make their businesses viable, not yours. No, you should stop giving your product away for free for your own sake. Make something that people find valuable enough to pay for. They'll thank you for it (with money), and you'll be a much happier founder as well.
Words of wisdom Courtland, thanks for sharing.
"No, you should stop giving your product away for free for your own sake. Make something that people find valuable enough to pay for. They'll thank you for it (with money), and you'll be a much happier founder as well." This especially rings true. If you build something that other people find valuable, the money will come.
Usually I find products that people are willing to pay for are:
Written like a kind father.
Thankyou John Galt.
Absolutely agree with you. But even when you offer something of great distinct value, there always will be people who won’t buy it because they except it to be free, especially within the B2C space. Most of my friends never buy apps. Why should they? Everything they use on their phone is free so why should this one great app cost money? And that’s a problem we (the tech industry) created ourselves. We simply invented that mindset. And I believe we should change this mindset... by stop making products available for free. It just gives the wrong signal.
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If the value offered by your product is significantly more than the competition and free alternatives then you shouldn't feel threatened. Many paid software has free and open source alternatives yet the paid one are still thriving because usually the experience you get with free software is abysmal. Power users may be tempted to use free tools but once they experience the polish of paid software they'll happily pay.
The issue is when the free alternative is really great and you can't offer something better.
... you're invalidating most of the internet. this very application (Indie Hackers) "runs" on software / products that are entirely, forever, free.
i understand your position... i've even written similar things, but, now... as i get older...
... there just isn't one "right" (or even "best") way to do anything.
a free product is just as good as a paid product if it solves the customer's real needs. i think this satisfies the creator regardless of financial outcome.
i see that as a very good thing. money isn't the end or the point for most things in life.
also, it might be worth studying economics and capitalism, free markets, and the effects of globalization / commoditization... i'm not an expert, but, i do know that the best thing about all of this...
... is that folks can make money even via "free" stuff. so cool.
I agree. I think the problem at the moment is that there are a lot of junk being peddled on the market. There's a lot of things on the internet like 8bit has mentioned which runs on free software. A lot of dev frameworks and dev tools are open source. Ghost blog for example gives their product for free as well as makes money through a charged for service. I think there is a LOT of benefit from providing services to others for free and looking to monetise or stay online in other ways. Wikipedia is one such 'public good'. I believe one of the worst things on the internet is communities that charge - beyond some membership fees (e.g. meetup) to stay alive, this is one of the worst ways to create unnecessary paywalls. This is why I've been looking to create free resources on Github and communities such as this!.
Certain products are more suited towards SaaS subscription models where the value may be heavily R&D or capital intensive. Others are better suited towards running some ads/sponsorship. A lot of great podcasts on the Internet e.g. Jordan Harbinger run on such a model. Resources that use open source software should keep the spirit of making things generally available to a wider public without gates. There is no need to sell newsletter subscription or user data.
So, tell me how I should make money by making my time tracking app available for "free"? Selling its newsletter's subscription list? Selling user data? Embedding a bitcoin miner?
I rather have my users simply pay for the app so I can spend the same dollars to buy food for my daughter. Things don't have to be so complicated, right?
How to make money with free apps ...
Todoist, 10M+ downloads, with in app purchases
Timesheet, 1M+ downloads, with in-app purchases.
They are not free in my opinion. The free plans are there just to push people to their paid plans. That makes total sense, similar to trials.
i'm not telling you what to do. i'm telling you to ease up on the language of telling folks they HAVE to monetize all the things. this isn't real life.
you're doing fine. 💪🏼
I'm intentionally blunt in my post to share my point. Of course, not everything should be monetized. But I think our industry should pay more attention to pricing products and especially being careful with giving things away for free. It can harm many things: the industry as a whole, direct competitors, and the lives of their developers.
dude, i'm with you 100%:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/indie-hackers-raise-your-price-youre-worth-it-42a42f5a06
so, we're on the same page!
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👍🏻
Btw, just saw your product - time tracker - in your profile. Congrats! You already have your paying customers :) !!
Thanks. Yeah, the product is successful. It has a nice MRR and happy users (4.6/5 based on 700+ ratings). So I know the product is valuable, yet some people still feel it should be free. And I blame our own industry for this behavior ;-).
When I launched conveythis.com in 2008, I gave it completely free as I couldn't comprehend how would users pay for machine website translation with amounts other than $0. Thanks to Google Translate, they completely vanished any incentive to innovate in this field and provide your own website translation software. However, as the time went by, some fellas from France showed us the way to make money with their own example. They launched a SaaS tool on WordPress that quickly gained popularity. So, I am kind of grateful to them that 1. they proved that some amateurs can build a tool for website translation and actually charge for it. 2. they started to train the market to accept the fact of paying monthly for a high quality language switcher. These things I would never been able to do since inside our document translation industry, that wasn't obvious. Only a foreigner, a newcomer could come up with something like that. I am grateful for this lesson.
Yeah, I totally agree, people don't appreciate 'FREE' stuff.
I disagree! I create things because I love to create things, and I love to see people using and enjoying things I’ve created.
I charge money because I need to survive under capitalism, but there are two huge drawbacks. One, it limits the number of people who can engage with my creations. Two — even worse — it strongly disincentivizes me from creating things that are difficult to monetize.
My dream society would have universal healthcare, basic income and invest in the arts, so I’d be able to create whatever I want without worrying about survival. Since that seems unlikely to happen in the US anytime soon, I’m working toward accruing enough wealth and side income that I can effectively do the same thing.
So how does that turn out if you give things away for free?
I can't yet. It's my goal, not my present situation.
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I think you’d see art flourish, actually. People have always created it despite a negative expected value. And the amount of open source software that exists makes it hard to believe that you’d see fewer people making that.
You might not see as many companies. But frankly, I don’t really care. There are businesses whose sole purpose is to help people running other businesses — and there are layers upon layers of this, to the point that the economy can feel like a paperclip maximizer. If such a society means we don’t have twenty different versions of the same productivity or website analytics app, you’ll forgive me for not shedding a tear.
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Without diving headfirst into the whole "capitalism vs. socialism" morass, there's more nuance than you're presenting here. Power is already concentrated in the hands of a few — and it's the people who control energy production and
robotspeople doing the boring work! — so I have a hard time believing that scenario is unique to the society I'm envisioning.The Cuba example is also specious. Their economy and the outcome you're describing didn't happen in a vacuum — for example, there was a decades-long trade embargo by the U.S.
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Also: VC is ruining the software business, while also giving us great tools. How do you compete with Notion? You can't, so I shelved a product idea, because Notion is better, improves faster, and can afford a free tier because of their VC funding. As a consumer, it's awesome to get for free an awesome product like Notion. For developers, good luck competing, even with a better idea / implementation, because you can't compete with free (at least not for long).
I've mostly given up (without trying) entering the smartphone app market, because when most devs give away apps for free or for $1 (before app store cut), you can only succeed with a bestseller. It's easy to be a employee dev, but it's getting harder by the day to be an small ISV.
The worst comes from "big tech" companies, like Microsoft and Google, who acquire software to get the IP or know-how, give it away for free, and then discontinue it. It screws developers (how do you compete with free??), and ultimately the users. The flip side is: if, when I started my dev career (broke student), I could have used VS Code, my life would have been so much easier! I don't use it today because I can afford Jetbrains stuff, but at that time, I would have killed to have a free programming editor like VS Code.
I 100% agree. In fact I wrote about this back in October (free post but membership required to read): https://polluterofminds.com/sell-everything/
Open source your free stuff, don’t try to make it a business. But when you are ready to ship a real app that you think provides value, charge for it.
I built a simple writing sprint app for the MacOS traybar and even that I charge a small fee for: https://getwritesprint.com
Exactly my thoughts and strategy these days. This is how I recently introduced ejectify.app. It's very simple but solves a real issue so why not charge a user for it? Made over $500 in one week so that's easy money but more importantly: shows its value. Also made it available on GitHub for issue tracking and sharing knowledge so I see it as a win-win-win.
That’s a really smart app. Nice work!
Thanks 🙏
Once again me ;)
Since you're a dev and created a time tracker. I have posted a question yesterday in the Building in Public group about which tags to use when tracking time for a project. I would appreciate your opinion on that!
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/free-time-tracker-which-tags-do-you-use-bc1b46cc57
Done. By the way, when would you pay for it? Looks like you're picking Clockify because of its price ($0) making you one of the guys I'm kind of attacking in this post ;).
clockify was the one I found when searching for a real free time tracking plugin.
I'm definitely ready to pay for a service like this once I see myself able to do so. This means, first I need to get some dollars with my projects. Otherwise I keep spending months over months and this soon adds up, email service here, time tracker there, seo/keyword tool here, xy there, and so on. And soon we are talking about 100+ usd/month without earning anything.
And the thing with tools like a time tracker is, it's 'just' convenient but not a deal breaker. It's nice-to-have but not must-have. I could - and I guess many people do - just track everything in a simple excel sheet or google sheet.
I'm a fan of dynamic price models. The more I need it the more it can cost. As long as my more on usage means more on income, I'm just fine with it. My problem with most of the models we have nowadays are those monthly subscriptions, no matter if you use/need it or not. And since I need to be careful with spendings I try to avoid it as long as possible.
I recently upgraded my laracasts.com subscription to a lifetime access (was offered in the cyber week, I just couln't recent since there a some very good series I haven't seen yet but definitely want to see; the lifetime gives me some more time to watch them when I need them to see).
Is this something that could make sense for your service? I guess with more data you could probably offer a lifetime deal many maybe cannot resist?
This is why I prefer subscriptions over (more expensive) lifetime options. It allows you to use it for as long as you need it. At the same time, its recurring income allows the developer to keep improving the app.
I actually have a lifetime option (2,5 times the yearly subscription). Simply to satisfy people preferring lifetime options, although I prefer subscriptions as can be read above.
Thanks for your feedback!
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Which is yet another reason to avoid having free users. Paying users are more valuable in different ways. They are more committed and will likely provide better feedback.
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All valid points and agree with them completely.
It's just the mindset of the (minority) subset of (potential) users expecting the app (or any app in general) to be free, that I find irritating. And I do not blame them: it's our own fault. We made them get used to getting software for free.
A recent example: https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/kc50r2/which_softwareappsaas_you_must_use_because_there/gfnvt3r/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3.
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And hence, my advice: put a price on it. You deserve it.
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Good domain name 🙂. Have you been asking your audience what they would like to pay for it and how they might use the data? Perhaps you can productize (and monetize) the use cases rather than just selling the (raw) data? Think of trends.vc of Product Hunt? I would rather pay for the use cases rather than the data itself.
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