No Freemium. Not for Free. Free

The freemium model is marketing, a clever funnel. Users get to play with the product until they hit the walls: a storage limit, an export button grayed out, or a 14‑day timer ticking down. That frustration is intentional, it turns “just curious” into “just paid”. And that revenue does not just cover the cost of those extra features, it props up an MVP weighed down with tech debt, growing infrastructure bills, and the payroll needed to keep chasing growth.

That is the real game, growth, not craft. New features to attract new users, even if the foundation cracks. The goal is not to make it sustainable, it is to make it bigger, to chase the next‑Google dream, or at least look valuable enough for an exit.

Free software comes from a different impulse. You build it for yourself first. You polish it because you rely on it. You craft it because creative minds hate to leave rough edges unshaped. And when you open it up, you are not giving away charity, you are inviting the world to help make it even better.

If you are proud of your work, you want to see it used, you want to see it free. There is nothing better than watching your solution live in the wild. More users bring more edge cases, and each one nudges the software into something great. That kind of refinement only happens when the backbone is built carefully, without the rush of quarterly deadlines, when there is room to focus on the invisible parts, the ones that make a tool last.