You are the product
⚠️ This is a draft. It's probably not very good. I'll post about it when it's done! ⚠️
You might have heard:
If you aren't paying for a thing, then you are the product.
What people mean by this is:
- Software (or a website) needs to make money
- so it needs to sell a product
- so if they aren't selling you something
- then they're selling to someone else
- and they clearly aren't selling the thing you're using
- so they're selling you.
What "selling you" means is:
- The software (or website) shows ads to you for things you will buy
- or it gathers data on you so other people can show ads to you
- or both.
Exceptions
Some things are free anyway, and don't make you the product:
- Signal messenger
- Bitwarden
- sourcehut
Notice the assumptions we made in our argument?
"Software needs to make money"
Some things are just free because someone wants to make a thing.
"They aren't selling to you, so they're selling you"
They could be selling to someone else.
B2B (business-to-business) software is aimed at big companies, who will spend ludicrous amounts of money on subscriptions, licences and support. Sometimes, that B2B software is also provided totally free to small customers. The seller thinks "why not", and also hopes that if you like their thing, you'll tell the big company you work at to buy their thing.
Usually this isn't the case though, and the free plan is full of ads or data-gathering.