• Search
• Google Reader
• Yahoo home page
• Facebook
• LinkedIn (although we pay for an upgrade on this one)
• Viddler (hosting videos for GroupSwim)

There are a handful of others but you get the idea.  However, these services are not “free”.  For the right to use them, I get to use a site cluttered with ads or they sell my information to make money.  This is an important point – companies “HAVE” to make money.  Unless they are supported through charity (or opensource which is essentially volunteerism), they must have revenue to exist and prosper.  Companies also have costs, which many of us fail to consider.  For example, software design, bandwidth, storage, hardware upgrades, etc. all represent legitimate costs software companies incur.  Steven Hodson on Mashable wrote a great post about how “free” things cost money and that expectations have become separated from reality.

So, if we all agree that services are not free, but you don’t pay for them, what are you giving them in return?  What does it cost you?

1. The opportunity to market to you.  Whether you explicitly realize or agree to it, all the services I list above and many more are constantly marketing to you.  I ignore 99.9% of it, but it is there
2. Your attention.  If you are using free stuff, it is taking your time.  It also takes you longer to do things on free sites because there are advertising and marketing barriers or gates you must pass through to use the service.  This takes time that you aren’t using for something else

If I’m looking at something for my business, these two “costs” are VERY expensive.  I would not want my employees or customers to waste time or be distracted for a minute much less the hours many of these services “cost”.  Paying a small fee in return for using a useful, value added service makes a ton of sense to me.

I learned a term in business school called TANSTAnAFL (there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch).  In spite of many businesses being created, grown, acquired, and funded, this principle still holds true.  My good friend Tom brought up the other tenet that holds true 100% of the time, which is “you get what you pay for.”  I’m simply amazed at the pervasiveness of people and companies that think this doesn’t apply to them and that stuff like GroupSwim should be free. At the end of the day (2 to 3 years from now), many of these companies that are “free” will be gone.  “Free” is not a sustainable strategy.