"No such thing as a free lunch." But man, we sure to like to pretend that there is.

Facebook. Instagram. WhatsApp. Snapchat. Twitter. LinkedIn. TikTok. These are all "free" services, right?

But wait.

They make billions of dollars every year. They pay their employees top salaries. Which means they are making money. So how are they making money if the platform is free?

After all, they're not listed in your credit card statement every month...

Double-dipping and the definition of "free" software

If you don't pay for the product you are the product.

Oh, so you're the product. They're monetizing you. Well then that's not actually free after all, is it? You're still paying for the service.

When you send someone a message on WhatsApp, that goes through Facebook servers. Those servers have costs associated with them. Those costs are being paid for somehow.

Okay, now let's talk about services that you do see on your credit card statement every month. Take Amazon as an example.

Let's say Amazon charges you $200 every year. Cool. They provide a service—like faster delivery—and you hand them $200 every year.

In this case, you're not the product, right? Since you're paying for the service, you shouldn't be the product.

Sadly, this couldn't be further from the truth.

We're long past the stage of being only the product.

Now, we pay for the product, and we also are the product.

We pay with cash and we pay with our data too.

Companies are double-dipping.

Netflix takes $23+ per month from your credit card, but also knows that you watched A Christmas Prince every day for the past 18 days. What else do they know? Probably too much. What are they doing with that data? Who knows. But it's there, mined, harvested, and stored—forever.

Redefining "free"

Virtually everything is advertised as free, but it's not. So why do we, in large part, pretend like this is okay?

I get it, it's a psychological phenomenon. We're naturally drawn to "free."

But at some point, we need to reset. We need to take a step back. We need to be truthful in our labeling and communications.

After all, we are paying for it in one way or another.

In the open source community, when something is advertised as "free," the first question asked is usually, "Free as in beer, or free as in freedom (or speech)?"

This is a great question because it creates an important distinction between the promise of the software being "free."

If it's free as in beer, you're not handing over cash for the software. Very straightforward.

If it's free as in freedom—also referred to as libre—it's often more enticing for open source geeks like myself.

This is because libre software gives you more freedoms, like:

  • Seeing how the software works (inspecting the code)
  • Running the software however you'd like
  • Redistributing the software
  • Improving the software for yourself and for others

Buying a delicious beer is nice, and you might be happy to return to your favorite bar and keep paying for it. But what if you could get the exact recipe, so you can brew it right at home?

This gives you the power and convenience of brewing it right at home. Whether you prefer to go out to the pub or not, it doesn't matter. Now, you at least have the freedom to brew it at home.

And since you know the recipe, you can modify it to make it even better. On top of all that, you can share it with your friends and family.

The importance of how we define "free" cannot be overstated. It really matters.

Language matters. How we speak matters. How we advertise matters.

We matter.

I wish I had a term as clear and concise as enshittification that I could coin to define this deception of software being "free."

For now, here are some ideas:

  • FFree (Fake Free)
  • DDFree (Double-dip Free)
  • Freenot

I'm not particularly happy with any of these, but frankly, I haven't given the term much thought yet. All of my effort has gone towards the concept instead.

If you have ideas for what this term should be, hit me up. 📥