Freebie Mentality

A while ago I built Calendar Butler. In my free time, for people who work for several clients at once. It runs, it has users, and it saves them a lot of time every year.

Recently I was in conversation with a company that would like to use Calendar Butler. They had recognized the benefit and calculated that the tool would save them about 3 full-time positions that are really only busy with pointless work, and that those people could do meaningful things instead.

Then my contact said something that floored me: “I see two options. The first: we somehow get it running on our own servers. The second: we just build it ourselves.”

To them it was a 'small tool someone wrote on the side'. That it is a product, with a customer base and on a path of expansion, had not occurred to them at all.

Calendar view of a Tuesday with three columns, showing appointments as grey blocks and busy times as hatched blocks

The benefit is big. It please mustn't cost anything.

What it delivers

Yes, it is simple: Calendar Butler reserves appointments. And it does so in a way that no data can leak or be exposed by accident, even in compliance-critical environments.

That saves freelancers and consultants a lot of time, money and nerves: if you assume 15 minutes of calendar upkeep a day, and that comes very close to what I see in practice, that adds up to 55 hours a year over 220 working days. For every single person. That is more than a working week coming back.

Everything should please cost nothing

What bothers me is less the single conversation. It is the attitude behind it, and it is not the first time I run into it: it may bring a lot, but please let it cost nothing. Many people would like the biggest gain to be free. I think that mentality is nonsense.

That someone built a tool in their free time does not make it cheaper. Behind something that runs there are development, testing, operations and support.

When I hand it on, that is not a favor, it is work. And the benefit others draw from it can rarely be compared with the price I name for it.

I am not alone in this. I have told other people about it, too, and many of us feel this way when we are asked to give away for free something that is worth a lot.

What I can change

We may see ourselves quite differently. We pay for our subscriptions and for the services we use. That is exactly why the freebie mentality annoys us twice and three times over.

We can't change other people. We won't change the fact that some people have this attitude. We can only change how we approach them and how we react. But then we must not stay quiet either.

So the question I ask myself is this: how do I deal with people who have this mentality, so that I don't keep getting annoyed myself?

It is a start: my contact, who got to the implementation steps very quickly, was, to put it mildly, surprised when I asked him whether he wouldn't want an offer first.