The mouse dies in the trap cause it doesn’t realise why the cheese is free. If the product is free, you are the product
Black image, white typewriter font, no sender.
Two sentences that describe the digital business model of the past twenty years better than most industry articles.
Free is not a price
The mouse in the trap doesn't pay with money. It pays with something it never saw as a currency before.
Exactly that happens millions of times a day. We don't pay with euros, we pay with attention, with behaviour, with data. And because no invoice ever shows an amount, it feels free.
Free is not a price. Free is just a price you don't see.
Every product has a business model
I have been building software for over 20 years. I know fairly precisely what a development team costs, what servers cost, what support costs.
If a product has millions of users and still asks for nothing, the costs haven't disappeared. Someone else is paying them. And that someone isn't being generous — they are the customer.
The question is never whether a product makes money. The only question is: off whom.
In a company this stops being a matter of taste
In private life, everyone can decide for themselves what their data is worth to them. That's a personal trade-off, and I won't make it for anyone.
In a company it's different. It's not holiday photos, it's customer data, quotes, calculations, contracts.
I regularly see businesses pushing exactly that kind of information through free tools, because it's quick and costs nothing. No contract, no contact person, no answer to the question of where that data ends up.
Whoever pays nothing isn't a customer. And whoever isn't a customer has no one to hold accountable.
With AI, the same pattern is running again
Only faster.
Free AI tools are great. They are also the most efficient way anyone has ever found to get at the knowledge and the working habits of millions of people. What you type in there isn't gone. It's somewhere else.
I work with AI every single day and consider it the biggest change of my career. That's exactly why I look very closely at which tool I feed with what.
Why I charge money for software
I made a deliberate decision to build software that customers pay for.
That's not a moral advantage, it's a structural one. If the user pays, the user is the customer. Then the product has to be good for them — and not for someone in the background they will never meet.
Paid software comes with an invoice, a contract, a responsibility and a human being you can call.
The one question
I'm not saying everything free is bad. I'm only saying: there is no product without a business model.
So with every free tool I ask myself the same question: who is actually paying here?
If I can't find the answer, I am the answer.