
The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret - leoh
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-cost-of-free-doughnuts-70-years-of-regret
======
013a
I can call out one example of a poorly executed price raise: Apollo Engine
([https://www.apollographql.com/pricing](https://www.apollographql.com/pricing))

There was a time when they charged for data points/performance traces ingested
into the system. At our scale, we were paying around $100/month. We were
prepared to scale that to their, I think it was, $550/month plan when our
usage got that high.

They relatively recently changed their structure to charge per registered
user. This would have raised our bill to around $1500/month at our current
scale, to get all of of the stakeholders in there.

This is a cost incongruent with the value we were getting out of it. Even a
~$500/month price tag does not correlate with the value received, at our
scale. It would one day (its a great product), but not today. So, today, we
have two employees who have access to that, keeping our spend the same.

Here's the key component of this pricing change though: They will, no longer,
be able to grow revenue with us. A pricing change forced us to make
organizational changes. Those organizational changes mean that fewer people
are seeing any value the product could deliver. When fewer people see the
value, then the product has fewer advocates within the organization; its
fungible utility will eventually be rolled into a competing product we already
pay for, like Datadog, even if the experience is worse, because when we
discuss Engine its always prefaced with "Oh, I think Dave in ops uses that, no
one else does".

~~~
tomjakubowski
In general for SaaS, does it make sense to let customers choose between two
(or more) pricing models, depending on their needs? Does this cause too much
complication for the business? Curious why I haven't noticed schemes like
this, other than at "enterprise" tiers where the customer is paying a lot for
something closer to a custom solution and prices are negotiated.

~~~
monadic2
I am quite curious why business plans themselves are not generally subject to
a/b testing....

~~~
praptak
Well, it would be like splitting a company into two parts competing with each
other. And wouldn't necessarily determine which plan is better - maybe plan A
is better on its own but was undercut by competition from plan B?

~~~
monadic2
> Well, it would be like splitting a company into two parts competing with
> each other.

Presumably you'd have to design the A/B test around this to get much use out
of it. However, when you're just starting a service and not sure how consumers
will view the value of it, the benefit is obvious.

------
WalterBright
Pricing things can be strange.

Back in the old Zortech days, we included full library source for free with
the compiler. Library source wasn't even available for other compilers. Nobody
particularly cared that we did that, and it was never mentioned in compiler
reviews in the press. One day, Borland decided to package partial (not
including floating point) library source for their compiler as a separate
product. The press went ape over it with headline articles about how great
this was. (Philippe Kahn was a marketing genius.) Naturally, we at Zortech
found this annoying.

What we did was separate out the free library source into a separate package,
and put a price on it. When people called up to buy the compiler, we'd ask "do
you want the library source package, too, for an additional $XX?" They almost
always said yes. So we made an extra $XX on each sale, leveraging the
expectations Borland had set in the market.

Of course, these days expectations have changed again. We give D all away for
free.

~~~
marktangotango
A looong time ago I worked at a comic book store and the owner had a table of
freebies at the front of the store. The distributors were always sending
marketing material with cool artwork, so instead of throwing it in the trash
when it piled up, he figured why not give it away?

No one touched it. Then he started packaging it into $5 “grab bags”. That crap
was gone in a week. The lesson? “You can’t give shit away, but put a price on
it and it’ll sell”.

Maybe that says more about comic book store patrons than pricing, I’m not
sure.

~~~
xyzzy_plugh
Recently I was moving and had some furniture ("junk") to dispose of. Calling a
company to come get it was really expensive considering the stuff was
effectively worthless. Posting it on Craigslist for free was useless -- no one
wants your crap fo free.

Posting a Craigslist ad for $20 for an otherwise free couch? Gone the next
day.

It's bizarre that this works, but boy, does it work.

~~~
user5994461
I recall a French website like craiglist but only for donation, a tad niche
but well known enough. Everything there was free for taking.

A decent half of listing were decent IMO, but oh boy, the other half were odd
stuff and/or in such conditions that I can't imagine anybody taking them (even
if paid to). The adage you get what you pay for holds true.

Funny enough, it's even worse the other way around, trying to give (good)
items for free. People are atrocious. They book to pick up and don't show up.
When they show up, they're often empty handed and act like unbelievable
idiots. "Oh it's the fridge from 3 years ago, not the newer model, nevermind
not interested." Can't believe this happening if I didn't hear it with my own
ears. Anyway, they came without appropriate transportation, couldn't pick up a
fridge/couch no matter what.

------
karaterobot
I didn't know about the Red Cross and its donuts. The example I've always used
for this is helping a friend move.

If the friend asks "hey, will you help me move? I'm buying pizza and beer
afterwards!" I will more than likely say yes, even though I can buy my own
pizza and beer.

If they instead say "hey, will you help me move? I'll pay you $21.58 for your
time," I'd probably bristle. Even though that might be the equivalent price of
a few slices of pizza and a beer, the category has changed from showing
appreciation to placing an actual value on my time, at which point working all
day for $21.58 stops making sense.

~~~
Zenbit_UX
You got weird friends, no one's ever had to ask or bribe me, I would just
offer to help.

In turn I'd also be uncomfortable asking others to do manual labor for me, if
they didn't offer when I said I was moving I wouldn't ask. Buying them supper
after would be a given, no bribe required.

~~~
ashtonkem
“I’ll buy you pizza for helping me move” is an extremely common social
interaction, to the point of being a trope. It’s not a bribe, it’s an
acknowledgement that helping somebody move is a huge amount of work and some
token of appreciation is wise.

GP doesn’t have weird friends.

~~~
jhbadger
And when I was TA grading exams, the professor would buy us all pizza as well.
It was technically unnecessary as grading was part of why were being paid as
TAs, but it was a nice touch and put us all in a better mood and with a
favorable view of the professor.

------
blakesterz
I witnessed something like this when I worked at a Six Flags amusement park
(wasn't 6F at the time) that had a decent size water park. They did exit
surveys every night, asking as many people as they could if things were ok,
and one year they also asked people "Would you pay extra for the water park",
it was free as part of admission. So they wanted to know if people would pay
extra. People said yes. Something like 90% of people said yes. So, of course,
the bosses all thought "hey we can make some extra money and people won't
mind!"

So fast forward to the next year, they charged the same for people to get in
and something like $10 to get into the water park. Something like 101% of
people were ANGRY. Not just a little angry, VERY angry. It was a HUGE change
that people didn't expect. There were VERY few people that paid. I can't
remember if they made it free that year or waited until the next.

~~~
RandallBrown
A park in Indiana, Holiday World, did something sorta the opposite.

They figured out how much the average guest paid for drinks, then raised the
ticket prices that much but made all drinks free in the park.

It was a huge success. People expect ticket prices to go up occasionally and
they expect to be gouged for drinks. By getting "free" drinks, it felt like a
huge value. (At least for me when I visited.) I bet it made food sales
increase too, because now people wouldn't have to pay for a drink too.

Not sure if they're still doing that, but at the time they also had free
sunscreen all over the park. It's an amazing little park.

~~~
save_ferris
Ive been saying for years that airlines should do this. Add the price of an
alcoholic beverage to everyone's ticket and then give those who want one a
"free" drink. I never understood why they opted to go with ruthless cuts and
declining customer experience.

~~~
jeromegv
For a while, Porter Airlines (Canada) would offer free coffee + free cookies
out of their terminal in Toronto. They would also offer you a free beer (a
full 500ml, not the 341ml one) on the flight if this was an afternoon/evening
flight. I feel that a lot of their expansion was just the word of mouth "OH
AND THEY GIVE YOU FREE COOKIES". Their flight might have been a bit more
expensive, but the amount of good will they got from those free items was huge
and for a while Porter was really what people preferred.

Then they sold their terminal and started leasing it, and now suddenly, no
more free coffee and free cookies. I don't know if the free beer is still
around but for a while we had everyone complain on how "they no longer have
free cookies". And then we just stopped hearing about it because people just
didn't care about Porter anymore, you would just get the cheapest flight and
that would typically not be them and it's not like they were offering
something special anymore.

It looks to me that this was probably not a super huge expense that was
probably giving them a much higher ROI than the pure $ value of what it cost
them.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
That's sad. I used to go to NYC from Toronto for work once every month or two
and I always flew Porter, and it was the best. The cookies and coffee was a
nice touch. Comfortable lounge, etc. But that was 8, 9 years ago, and the last
time I flew Porter was to Burlington, VT (before they cut that route) to go
skiing, and they were in the process of renovating the lounge and changing
things around. There was still free coffee but the shortbread cookies were
nowhere to be seen; I could see things were changing.

That route was the best, BTW; I'd leave my house at 6:30am or so by taxi, get
an early morning flight to Newark, take the train to Penn station, walk from
there to the office and still arrive before many of my NY coworkers were at
the office. Once we got bought by Google I found I could still make it to the
Google NYC office in time for breakfast service. Memories :-)

------
dperfect
It's true - charging for something that was once free can be risky, but it
isn't always bad as some might believe. I have great respect for businesses
that charge for a service that provides real value - even if it was once free.
Often times (especially in the startup world), companies start out offering a
free product (operating at a loss) to gain market share. It's not often the
best strategy, but in some markets it's one of the few ways to break in and
gain traction. Obviously, you can't sustain operating a business that way
forever, so you eventually have to make up for it somehow.

Unfortunately, a lot of tech companies have (perhaps unintentionally)
conditioned consumers to _expect_ software to be free. The terrible
consequence is that in response to that pressure, many companies choose
ethically-questionable ways to make money when they need to, rather than
simply charging a fair and honest price for their product (this includes
selling users' data, overwhelming the user experience with ads, in-app
purchase shenanigans, etc). Paying fair prices for things we use isn't the
most appealing idea in the world, but (in my opinion) we probably need more of
it, not less.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
A similar thing happens in the podcasting space.

It's a pity it's still quite inconvenient to make micropayments. If I could
make a single click to pay a penny for access to a single article, I imagine
I'd do so frequently.

~~~
1123581321
You would need to pay quite a bit more to make this viable for most
publications. The ballpark formula is the issue price divided by the number of
articles the average reader wants to read enough to pay _anything_. For
example, a WSJ is $4, so if readers wanted to read ten articles, they should
charge 40-50 cents for them.

A more realistic price might be $1-2/article since the median reader won’t be
that interested. Pricing schemes that increase the total reading cost on a log
curve can be imagined.

Of course we dream of a micropayments system fluid enough that people start
consuming 10-100x the content so the price per piece can go down accordingly,
but that is unlikely since there isn’t that much free time. A first mover
might accumulate a lot of new readers, but that would eventually even out.

~~~
user5994461
The price needs to be at or below $0.09 for people to just unlock the news and
read on, no thinking.

An online newspapers might make $3 per thousand views, plastering ads
everywhere and maybe videos. That means they survive with way less than 1
penny per view. They have no excuse to try to charge orders of magnitude more.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
Not all online news sites are the same. The New York Times does real
journalism, which takes real resources. I'm not convinced that they can be
sustained on advertising dollars.

> They have no excuse to try to charge orders of magnitude more.

But that's just what you proposed. $0.09 is over an order of magnitude greater
than $0.003. That pricepoint would still be fine - far less than the price of
a coffee.

------
andai
See also: monkey grape experiment

[https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2014/02/27/283348422/that-...](https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2014/02/27/283348422/that-
s-unfair-you-say-this-monkey-can-relate)

I heard a related story (I'll add source if I find it) where monkeys received
2 grapes every day. This was increased to 3 grapes per day for one week. When
they returned to the normal 2 grapes per day, the monkeys threw poo at the
experimenters.

~~~
jrootabega
Grapes ARE rich in fiber

------
ChuckMcM
This is a good cautionary tale and one I've seen played out in the tech
industry with food. Even in the 80's it wasn't uncommon for a tech company to
have a "beer bust" on Friday's where drinks and snacks were served as a social
gathering for employees at the end of the work week. It was a turning point in
employee relations when the VP of HR at Sun cancelled the weekly beer bust.
Similarly at Google when they decided to scale back the legendary "mini-
kitchens" full of snacks, "healthy alternatives" that were slowly pared down.

One sociologist I read wrote, and I'm paraphrasing, "Sharing food with another
is an action of great significance. Evolutionary, the sharing of food by
hunter gatherers was more significant than sex in establishing a mutually
bonding relationship." They went on to discuss the importance that meals
played in our history and why we "throw a feast" to welcome heroes, and the
Jesus' "big reveal" happened at a meal.

The main point was that when you share food with someone you trigger a very
ancient and well established mechanism. Conversely, when you _stop_ sharing
food with someone, you signal their ancient brain "I don't trust you any more,
we aren't friends."

Now whether or not that thought/emotion comes to the surface, it's very clear
that the for many people the change from "sharing food with you" to "not
sharing food with you" changes how they see their relationship with you. What
is perhaps worse is that the damage is instant and irreversible. Even if you
start sharing again, the people you stopped sharing with, even temporarily[1],
will no longer feel the same trust that they felt before.

At tech companies those people leave and eventually you have all employees who
only remember the current system and so you're at a new "normal."

Bottom line, taking away "free" food is waaaay more impactful on company
morale/relationships than you would ever imagine unless you had researched it.
Thus, it happens over and over again. And even though I _know_ a company is
just trying to make me like it by giving me free food, I can't keep myself
from being positively effected by it. That response is buried somewhere deep
inside my head that doesn't allow for excision.

[1] Yes, there are ways to temporarily stop and not disconnect but that
involves messaging before one stops sharing to both provide the external
reason for the change and the conditions on which the change would revert back
to sharing.

~~~
refurb
I immediately thought of company perks as another good example of this.

I can remember when my company was trying to spend less, so they took away an
employee perk. Now this employee perk was kind of ridiculous (no other company
paid for it) and it wasn't that popular (a few people used it).

However, when they took it away? Holy crap were people pissed.

This is one of the big lessons for me early in my career. Before you do
something, ask yourself if you're prepared to do it forever. Sometimes it
doesn't matter, but sometimes it does and you'll be better off if you never do
it in the first place versus doing it and then taking it away.

~~~
ja27
We went through this. When 2008 hit the company stopped providing free sodas
and bottled water for our office of only about 30 people. I was damn close to
just buying them myself but it was crazy how upset a few people making
moderately insane amounts of money would get over not getting a $1/day
benefit.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I completely relate to both of these.

My experience is that you get a mix of people saying "just give me the money,
I'll decide if I want to spend it on snacks" and people who say "I really like
that snacks are available, please keep them."

From a financial perspective its pretty hard "move the needle" on an engineers
salary with free snacks and drinks. Median engineering salary in the Bay Area
is more than $100K. So assuming the engineer was consuming $20 of snacks per
day, 5 days a week 50 days a year, that is $5,000 per year per engineer. Not
surprisingly there was lots of data on this at Google which I got a chance to
review when I made a big stink about the switch in juice vendors. Not
something I could share but it looked exactly like I expected it to look, sort
of a power log curve where most people were way under the average and a much
much smaller number were way over. That they couldn't manage the people who
filled up their back packs with food and drinks for their family before they
went home each night was telling on a number of levels.

Of course the IRS and New York Times are all about how this "under the table
benefit is robbing us of income tax" is pretty predictable as well.

[1] [https://www.indeed.com/career/engineer/salaries/San-
Francisc...](https://www.indeed.com/career/engineer/salaries/San-Francisco-
Bay-Area--CA)

~~~
nitwit005
> That they couldn't manage the people who filled up their back packs with
> food and drinks for their family before they went home each night was
> telling on a number of levels.

Oh that one is easy. The management all want to take home stuff too. My last
company had some IT items that you could get from vending machines. The moment
I said I was leaving a manager asked if I could use my badge to grab something
for her, saying she'd already maxed out for the month. I realized I'd become a
source of untracked purchasing, and assumed she probably wanted to take an
item home.

------
manuel_w
It is interesting to me how much free givaways people get in America.

In Austria (and maybe some other parts of Europe, not sure), not only that
free refills are unheard of, you even get charged for ketchup sauce at
McDonalds. (The minimal allowed food quality is higher, though, so there might
be economic reasons on top of, I believe, primarily societal reasons.)

It is charged somewhere around 40 to 50 Eurocent per 25ml.

~~~
frakkingcylons
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that if fast food places charged for
condiments or soda refills in America, customers would become violent with
employees.

A customer shot employees at a McDonald's because the customer wasn't allowed
to dine in the restaurant: [https://www.latimes.com/world-
nation/story/2020-05-07/police...](https://www.latimes.com/world-
nation/story/2020-05-07/police-2-mcdonalds-workers-shot-over-dining-area-
closure)

~~~
greedo
When I worked at McDonalds during college, we implemented a surcharge for
people wanting extra sauce for McNuggets. It was like $.25 each. If you bought
a 6 pack you got 2 things of sauce. A 9 pack came with 3, and a 20 pack came
with 5. So really, you got a lot of sauce included.

But people were pissed. It was only a small portion of customers who even
asked for more than the include packages, but they were hot about it.

When I first started, we didn't even give free refills of soda or coffee. And
I remember, we had this group of senior citizens who came in every morning as
a group to just drink coffee and BS. Well, the tax rate in CA changed one day,
bumping the price of a cup of joe up a penny. You'd think we had stolen their
Social Security checks. They were outraged. Trust me, you do not want a pissed
off senior citizen yelling at you when you're 16.

------
hammock
Once you lower the price of a product, you can never raise it again.

I heard that on/around HN at some point and I haven't seen it proven wrong
yet. There's a reason why chip bags get smaller, why new versions that seem
identical to the old come out, why Tommy Hilfiger will never be a prestige
brand again. And it's because customers don't tolerate raising prices.

~~~
Retric
Cars are a major counter example. Over time the Honda Accord, Honda Civic, and
Honda Fit all started at about the same size but the current Accord and Civic
have grown significantly larger and thus more expensive. The idea is to let
brands grow up with people, so someone who bought a civic at 30 can likely
afford a slightly nicer civic at 35, and also needs an incentive to upgrade.

A few well received wine brands for example have had very rapid price
increases. However, it’s more common to increase prices a little faster than
inflation which quickly adds up, see Disneyland for example. What brands can’t
do is lower cost _and quality_ then try and quickly add it back.

PS: In 1964 Disneyland charged 25c/day for parking per day or about 2.08$ in
today’s money. Except they currently charge 25$/day for parking.

~~~
jagged-chisel
I don't think your car example holds up. Sure, Honda has brands they call
"Accord" and "Civic", but a 2019 Accord is different from a 2014 Accord. I
don't think anyone would tolerate a rise in prices on a 2014 Accord
manufactured year after year: if Honda never changed the car and continued
calling it "2014 Honda Accord", I don't think they could raise its price.

I'm a little closer to accepting your premise with Disney. However, it's not
"parking" you're paying for; it's "parking at Disney" and Disney continually
makes changes to its product offering. Further, neither "parking at Disney"
nor "tickets for Disney" are a regular, periodic purchase.

~~~
Retric
We are talking about brands:

> Tommy Hilfiger will never be a prestige brand again.

They don’t sell the same shirts every year either. But, they can’t simply make
a better product next year and expect to charge premium prices because people
associate brands with relative costs. Bud light at 30% more a case is not
going to sell well even if they suddenly increased the quality. Thus Honda
created the Acura brand when they wanted to sell up market, and even BMW swaps
to Rolls-Royce when they want to go really up market.

------
blululu
Interestingly enough I used to work at a company where the one any only
benefit was occasional doughnuts on Friday (we did not get health
insurance/dental/vision/retirement). And honestly we would all be pissed on
the days when Doughnut Friday was cancelled.

~~~
Forge36
My company did this once a month on new hire day. It was cancelled and people
were very angry. This was a few years before i started. 10 years later people
are still angry, and some never had that benefit!

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
It's like the monkey banana thing.

------
torgard
As an aside, I am really, really surprised and happy to see a plain-text
website available, if you decline cookies. That's a neat approach.

~~~
Etheryte
As someone who has turned nearly all cookies off, I appreciate (and use) the
plaintext site as well, but there's really no actual reason why they couldn't
serve the regular site without cookies all the same.

~~~
MauranKilom
I don't think it's GDPR compliant, but I'll take it over some other obnoxious
"solutions" out there.

~~~
bhelkey
Oh, and why is that?

------
vmception
Is there anybody alive that holds this grudge? Even with the article from
2012, I don't know

Was this grudge instilled in children?

~~~
Loughla
Grandpa is 97 this year. He still refuses to support the red cross, because
they charged for coffee and donuts in WW2 Guam.

He still talks about it like it was a personal attack. I grew up thinking the
Red Cross was a for-profit war-profiteering leach of an organization.

~~~
afterburner
> He still talks about it like it was a personal attack

Not surprising, otherwise he wouldn't hold the grudge for so long.

Many climate change deniers feel like even implying they're a (tiny) part of
the (systemic) problem is a personal attack, hence their shitty attitude about
science.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
I know a guy who died recently who didn't eat rice and exclusively bought
Chinese and Korean electronics as a result of his involuntary relocation to a
certain pacific island from 1942-45. He wasn't personally the target by any of
the orders that the people he was wronged by were following yet I think most
people would consider the grudge reasonable since he was personally affected
even though it wasn't personally targeted at him. I consider OP's
grandfather's grudge to be along those same lines albeit over a much more
minor wrong.

~~~
redis_mlc
> He wasn't personally the target by any of the orders that the people he was
> wronged by

I study WW2, especially the Pacific.

Trust me, that war was taken very personally, especially by infantry.

(The next time you watch a documentary on Saipan or Tarawa, note the American
rifles are pointed at the ground, since the enemy was coming up through cave
networks behind lines. Talk about close quarters fighting!)

------
drewcoo
It's not about "used to be free." The Red Cross regularly shows up wherever
there are people in need and charges them for things of negligible value.
Years ago I was in a natural disaster where the power was out. The Salvation
Army was handing out free blankets and hot meals but the Red Cross was
charging for cups of coffee.

They are still like that to this day. No deep historical knowledge required.

------
djrogers
Sounds particularly relevant given the recent Wink pivot that's being called
'ransomware'.

------
willart4food
> "Imagine, for Thanksgiving, you go to your parents' for dinner and after a
> nice dinner they say, 'That's going to be $10 per person,' " Simonsohn says.
> "You would be upset."

LOL, my first ex-wife's mother would charge $40/person for hosting the
mandatory Thanksgiving dinner, after people also contributed in the way of co-
ordinated sides, fixings, beverages.

By the way, $40/person in the 90's.

And no she was not poor, and nobody in the family was flush with cash.

~~~
pkrotich
> my first ex-wife

Now you have me wondering how many ex-wives you got! Sorry but couldn't
resist.

------
paypalcust83
Both of my grandfathers retired SMSgts and I have two veteran flag cases above
the monitor where this was typed.

According to my late paternal grandparents, who went through WWII, Korea, and
Vietnam on active duty (and arguably the wives did as well), the American Red
Cross had not-so-nice aspects to it that didn't get much press.

Perhaps national governments should support apolitical, non-religious
volunteer nonprofits more, but I can also understand the need for nonprofits
to survive (which may often entail charging small fees). Charging people for
doughnuts who don't make much money to begin with, are first-responders,
active-duty military, or individuals who just went through a disaster seems
kind of uncool where I come from.

It's difficult to say how good they are today without first-hand and multiple
accounts of experience. The available data shows they presently spend 3.5%
($104m) on admin and 6% ($177m) on fundraising.
[https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...](https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=3277)

As an example, Feeding America, although they pay their CEO 16% more ($100k+),
is a mostly better charity on paper.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
I tend to make all my stuff open-source and free. I have no intentions of ever
charging for it.

I do this for a couple of reasons:

1) "Brand-building." I'm developing a "personal brand," and I do it for a
similar reason as companies give away free T-shirts with their logo.

2) Lead by Example. I have a beef with the quality of most software, these
days. I have decided not to whine about it.

Instead, I just write my own software the way that I think it should be
written, and leave it out there. Since quality isn't really a coefficient in
most developers' minds, these days, it doesn't get much attention; which is
fine by me.

So...sort of "virtue signaling," but in an even more passive-aggressive way.

I also have a personal policy of making all my work public, because I am used
to it, and I think that it helps me to write better software. You always
vacuum before the in-laws visit.

I would never charge for my open source (MIT-Licensed) work, but I also put
the source up there for the stuff I do charge for (a tiny pittance). It isn't
licensed for reuse, but it's out there.

If someone hires me to write proprietary software, then I won't put it out
there (unless that's what the customer wants). I did a great deal of "behind
the firewall" work that is likely to never see the light of day (indeed, much
of it was in products that were never even officially released).

Otherwise, I'm likely to keep putting my work out there for free; whether or
not anyone else cares.

I care.

~~~
mikekchar
Free and open source licenses are really useful. Works licensed like that are
worth significantly more to me that works that aren't licensed like that. Of
course, charge whatever you want for your code, but I don't think you should
avoid charging for code that has an MIT license. Quite the contrary!

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
Fair 'nuff, but I'm not in this for the money.

I know that makes me a bit of an "outlier" in the tech industry, but I guess
I'm a bit of a "throwback."

I enjoy sharing, and I enjoy shipping apps. It's my dream to code for free;
and I'm just about there.

Writing the code I want to write, without having people deliberately spike the
development process, is kind of fun.

I mention my outlook here: [https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-
ships-are-...](https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-
built-for-595f4ae2c284)

BTW: I've enjoyed reading a lot of your comments. You like to write.

~~~
mikekchar
Thank you. I _do_ like to write. I'm also really happy when people read what I
write. It looks like we have a lot in common based on what you've written
there. If you'd ever feel like trying out pair programming (remotely), give me
a shout!

------
hvasilev
Same is with Free Software. On one hand it is nice that you are receiving so
much value for free, on the other all business models revolving around it
contradict basic sales principles and are wildly unsuccessful.

So for example, I use horrible debuggers like GDB in 2020, because there is no
company that is willing to put that much effort and take that much of a risk
into developing a better tool debugger, since there are no profit incentives
around it. You cannot really expect developers to pay for their tools in 2020
and that is both good and bad.

------
papito
If you have a service where the free deal was too good to be true, then it
works. I am not salty at the New York Times. I pay for the subscription and it
is well worth it.

Also, now I want a coffee and a doughnut, goddamn it. Is Dunkin still open in
quarantine?

~~~
elliekelly
They’re open _and_ oddly enough they’re currently doing a “Free Donut Friday”
promotion...

------
danso
I didn't listen to the audio version of the posted link, but it's 5 minutes
long and seems to be an excerpt of this 20 minute episode of Planet Money:

[https://www.npr.org/2020/01/08/794592539/episode-386-the-
cos...](https://www.npr.org/2020/01/08/794592539/episode-386-the-cost-of-free-
doughnuts)

Transcript:
[https://www.npr.org/transcripts/794592539](https://www.npr.org/transcripts/794592539)

------
oxfeed65261
NPR’s headline is misleading—the problem was not _free_ doughnuts, it was
_charging_ (briefly) for doughnuts. In any case, fascinating; thanks for
posting.

~~~
adventured
It's not misleading. Free doughnuts were part of the problem. The British
soldiers were upset that they had to pay for their snacks while the American
soldiers were receiving theirs for free, and it caused tensions. The free
doughnuts helped to cause that imbalance and tension, which led to charging
for the snacks.

~~~
dmckeon
One wonders what the alternative-history narrative would be if the US had
offered to pay the Brits for their soldiers’ snacks? Perhaps the common UK
complaint about US soldiers in WWII would have been: overpaid, oversexed,
_overweight_ , and over here. :-)

~~~
NikolaeVarius
With lend-lease, I can imagine at least some of it was already subsided

------
ja27
I volunteered for the Red Cross for about 3 years in the 1990s and probably
heard this two dozen times from from random people when they saw the logo.

------
leoh
Reminds me of the Google situation with Reader.

------
TeMPOraL
Anyone remembers the drama that happened when JetBrains announced they're
switching to subscription model with their IDEs? That's also a categorical
change: from a product, to a service.

After a deserved backlash, they fortunately backtracked and allowed people to
buy perpetual licenses. But it left a bad taste.

------
Causality1
It may be irrational, but I have a visceral hatred for people who make
something free online and then take it down after they find a way to charge
for it, especially if the community they were posting it on collaborated with
editing, feedback, and suggestions.

------
tonyedgecombe
One of the most demotivating experiences I had as an employee was when my
employer put me on a commission scheme then did everything they could to
wriggle out of paying the commission. They would have been better off not
offering it in the first place.

------
RickJWagner
One nit-pick.

Per Wikipedia, "member stations derived 6% of their revenue from federal,
state and local government funding, 10% of their revenue from CPB grants, and
14% of their revenue from universities"

NPR is most certainly _not_ 'free'.

------
kimi
I am amazed at how good the no-cookie experience is. You get a readable,
basic-HTML formatted article, and nothing else. And that is - go guess? -
exactly what you wanted for reading an article. +1

------
sosuke
I think this is the first time I thought TSNM; Too Short, Need More

------
fulldecent2
Here's the solution. And it applies to Red Cross and other related enterprise
changing from free to paid.

1\. Stop giving away doughnuts 2\. Start selling funnel cakes

------
8bitsrule
"veterans don't like the Red Cross ... he always got the same answer: the
doughnuts."

For my dad it was the apples. "Shriveled and all dried out."

------
rb808
I thought the regret would be diabetes and heart disease.

------
mirimir
So npr.org won't let me read unless I agree to be tracked. Which is illegal
under GDPR, I think.

But in any case, I've realized something. In the URL, just replace
"[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/"](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/")
with "[https://www.wbur.org/npr/"](https://www.wbur.org/npr/") and the damn
page just loads.

So I picked another npr.org article recently posted to HN:
[https://www.npr.org/2020/05/06/849996451/what-hamburgs-
misst...](https://www.npr.org/2020/05/06/849996451/what-hamburgs-missteps-
in-1892-cholera-outbreak-can-teach-us-about-covid-19-resp)

And yes, this URL loads without challenge:
[https://www.wbur.org/npr/849996451/what-hamburgs-missteps-
in...](https://www.wbur.org/npr/849996451/what-hamburgs-missteps-
in-1892-cholera-outbreak-can-teach-us-about-covid-19-resp)

So hey :)

------
viburnum
Troops and cops are the most aggrieved people in the world.

------
postit
Meetup folks can learn a lesion or two from this.

------
jt2190
(2012)

------
ryanmarsh
Paying for doughnuts is not why veterans don’t like the Red Cross.

~~~
bhelkey
Oh? Then what is the reason?

------
DoreenMichele
This is something I have thought a whole lot about. I blog and I want that
information freely available, but I also need an income. I don't have a
problem with the fact that people on HN actively find ways around paywalls
which I think people on HN tend to find surprising because I spend so much
time criticizing the idea that "You people want good writing and you want it
all for free, so you basically expect writers to be slave labor for you."

What I'm saying is that this is not an easy problem to solve because in any
business, some of the things you provide will be provided for free. For
example, businesses that serve food have bathrooms available for free.

In busy downtown areas or areas with a lot of homelessness, you will see local
establishments with signs saying the bathroom is for customers only and some
even have security codes so you can't just walk in off the street and head to
the bathroom. But they don't charge for use of the bathroom.

If you are a small shop, figuring out what to do for free and what to do for
pay is a thorny issue because time is money and it's easy to end up in a
situation where you are de facto slave labor.

For some businesses on the internet, your members who are there because it is
free can be part of the value you are bringing to the table and if you try to
charge and you drive those people away, you may kill the business because now
your paying customers have no reason to pay you. The membership base was part
of your value position and you've just thrown the baby out with the bath
water.

So before you go acting like businesses who give stuff away for free are
somehow nefarious actors, stop and realize that successful businesses have to
pursue models that are viable and those models have real world factors. This
is not just something decision makers at companies can arbitrarily decide
willy nilly. You need to be taking the landscape of your marketplace into
account when trying to figure out what piece of your product is the piece you
charge for or monetize and what piece is something you give away for free.

Historically, TV was free to viewers. You just needed to own a TV, but
subscription channels came later. It got monetized with advertising and having
a large audience helped you monetize it. That large audience was valuable to
your advertisers, so giving it away for free to viewers was part of how you
made your money.

So this model wasn't born with the internet. It existed before the internet.
And there are valid arguments to be made concerning things like "If you aren't
paying for it, you are the product, not the customer" and lots of different
angles to look at such questions.

But at the end of the day, there is no free lunch. You somehow need to pay the
bills. And sometimes the method that actually works effectively isn't as
straight forward as "Well, just charge people for using the darn thing."
Sometimes that doesn't work at all and in other cases it may work, but will
limit your growth. Sometimes giving part of it away for free is how you grow
to the point of being able to make serious money.

------
jokit
TANSTAAFL

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
TANSTAAFD

Remember when ATMs were free?

------
WalterBright
My head says people should pay for things, my heart says soldiers ought to get
free coffee and doughnuts.

------
jankotek
>The problem isn't the price

Price was absolutely the problem. Soldiers were paid about $600 year. Not much
for a job where you risk your life and dont have much of personal freedom or
comfort.

Free food was part of benefits. Charging soldiers for it seems ludicrous, they
can not just leave, and go to nearest cafe.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> " _Free food was part of benefits_ "

The Red Cross is a civilian organization that is not part of the army and was
not, as far as I know, obligated to provide free donuts or coffee.

~~~
jankotek
Army asked for it, anyway politics are irrelevant to feelings.

Pay was $50 a month, doughnut was 2 cents, that is like 1% paycut.

~~~
traes
Think of a random cafe offering complementary free donuts to veterans, and
then deciding (or being told) to start charging for them. The Red Cross _was
not_ a perk provided and paid for by the army. It's really not that
outrageous.

