why i like (some) paid services

my favorite place to play chess online is lichess, a foss project. funded only by donations, and with no extra features for people who donate, the project “is entirely free, forever, and for everyone.” beyond being in line with foss ideals, this method of funding is part of lichess’ success. unlike chess.com, which requires users to hand over personal information and deal with the hassle of creating an account before playing a single game of chess either with friends or strangers, you can go to lichess and play chess with no barriers.

unfortunately, some services are either sufficiently load bearing (such as email), have an insufficiently small base of users, or both. for these services, donations alone are often not a good fit for sustainable funding, in the long term.

in these instances, i believe there are (broadly speaking) three ways to run a moral tech service/business. least good, (e.g. bitwarden) you can offer the core of your service for free and charge for add-ons which are genuinely not required and not exploit your free customers. better, (e.g. mullvad) you can offer a service at one noticeably fair price for every user. best, (e.g. sourcehut) you can offer a service at the cost of providing it to all users while encouraging users of more means to contribute more and users who can’t afford any cost to receive the service despite that.

each of these is improved by the business having transparent pricing and improving the space it exists in. For example, mullvad charges a flat €5 per month (as the singular pricing option) while improving access to privacy broadly through hosting privacy focused dns servers and maintaining the mullvad browser, both of which are free.

i am suspicious of the first type of business. it is often too tempting to avoid prising off actually important features to hide behind the pay-wall and it is also often associated with complicated pricing schemes. additionally, especially with publicly traded companies, companies planning to be public, or companies angling to be bought out, companies with this model almost always seek to squeeze profit out of their unpaid users through other means.

less important, but still of concern to me, is a more amorphous concern with these types of businesses. while most of their accounts are humans (majority unpaid), they often prioritize opening paid accounts with corporations. this makes sense, in a way. use the profits from paid corporate accounts to subsidize the often high proportion of unpaid human accounts. humans get ‘basic’ free accounts and companies benefit from added features and support. this sounds reasonable, but in practice, despite offering fully featured accounts to individuals, these companies seem to almost inevitably begin to see only two buckets.

a great example of this is bitwarden. while it is a service i currently use and heavily recommend, the top page worth of the company homepage features exactly two buttons, side by side, “get started for free” and “talk to sales”. of course, humans can also buy their way through the paywall, but they represent such a vanishing part of these company’s total funding that this funding structure nearly always results in these companies heavily prioritizing chasing money from other companies. the incentives of this style of funding v often lead to the same misalignment of the service from the needs of human users over time that traditional company funding structures exhibit. (in short, just a much longer path to enshittification)

github is an example of this. github is free*. github will advertise microsoft’s llm to you. it will harvest your code to feed to the llm. as a public company, it doesn’t care about just covering costs - it doesn’t even care about profit in dollars - it cares about how much /more/ profit it can make this quarter than last quarter for its shareholders. it needs more out of you now, whether that means offering you less or taking more from you, and it will need to extract even more in a few months, every few months, forever. how possibly can a company operating with that singular incentive fail to relentlessly exploit its customers, its employees, and the society it exists within.

the counterpoint of this is sourcehut. it is, in all of the best ways, clearly ideologically motivated. it is an alternative to github which runs on FOSS software. it does not use llms, it doesn’t advertise on the site, it doesn’t track users, and every feature works with javascript turned off in your browser. their creed is:

We are here to make free software better. We will be honest, transparent, and empathetic. We care for our users, and we will not exploit them, and we hope that they will reward our care and diligence with success.

in line with those principles, the service tiers are based on how much you feel able to pay ($2, $5, or $10) with literally no difference between the service provided. and if you can’t afford $2?

SourceHut never asks for payment from anyone whose financial situation would not comfortably support their subscription fee. We are committed to never pricing anyone out of using our services — hundreds of people have applied for and received financial aid for any number of reasons. Please contact support if you wish to apply for financial support.

additionally:

Just here to contribute? Payment is only required for users who wish to host their own projects on SourceHut. If you’re just here to contribute to an existing project, feel free to sign up for an account without paying for it. And many features don’t even require an account!

Want to self host? SourceHut is 100% open source. If you have your own infrastructure, you can run it yourself. Head over to installation docs to get started.

in my view, sourcehut is pretty close to the ideal; sourcehut makes sense even in a world with no exploitation and no enclosure. it has been said that a company (like a music label) that sells a /thing/ (like songs) usually prioritizes ensuring people who do not pay do not have access to that /thing/ over providing the best version of that thing (drm hurts paying customers too). sourcehut is the antithesis of that. the only thing they charge for is literally providing the service; if you don’t wish to use their servers you can host the software yourself. the cost is low enough that maximizing profit is clearly not the priority, especially since you don’t even have to pay at all if you can’t afford to.

increasingly i have been seeking out companies with these pricing models, especially the second two, to replace both free* and paid services i have been using before which are more exploitative and less sustainable. you can see my current choices here. if there are any services you would recommend which aren’t mentioned there, please reach out!