“Free”…

Are you like me?  That word “Free” always catches my attention.  Then I think to myself, “Wait.  What’s the catch?”  There is always a catch, true?  It’s in the fine print.  Free – with conditions! 

In the B2B sales profession sellers are classically trained to defer the price discussion until the end of their selling cycle.  They want more time for the customer to see the value of their offering before disclosing the bad news.  Unfortunately, the Modern Buyer knows that game.  Besides, there’s those pesky Murphy’s Laws and maxims: 

Business Maxims 

• No matter how low you bid the job there is always an idiot out there willing to do it for less.

• The more you cut your price to get business, the more likely you are to go out of business.

• The more you try to compete on a price basis the lower your prices will go.

Corollary: Your income will follow. 

“Well Gary”, you might challenge. “What about all those free cell phone apps?”  

In the tech space the game is played differently.  The known catch for some of those apps are ads.  Are you like me?  I’m willing to tolerate ads in exchange for my free version of Pandora.  But ads or not, there’s another hidden price to pay for those “free” apps. 

Productizing myself, I asked my free version of ChatGPT about those free cell phone apps: 

• As of September 2025, Google Play has about 2,074,270 apps, of which 2,011,196 (~97%) are free.

• The Apple App Store has about 1,994,112 apps in total, with 1,900,753 (~95.4%) being free,

• Combining just those two major stores, that gives us roughly 3.9 million free apps. 

3.9 million!  But are they really free?  Actually… no: 

If an app is free then the user is the product. 

Dr. Troy Butler

Turns out the product is you and me; it’s our online clicks; it’s what we say out loud in the mere presence of our cell phone; it’s our Ring doorbells; it’s our smart refrigerators.  The machines are watching us; recording us; productizing us; and then selling us.  And best of all for AI; we are the ones who are free!  It’s all in their “Terms and Conditions” aka fine print. 

Oh well.  At least we still have chocolate milk.  And everyone knows: 

Money talks but chocolate sings! 

                   Unknown Sage

Whoops… to get the cereal you have to buy the milk.  "Free" - with conditions! 

GAP 

When life gets tough we could get a helmet… or… we could leverage the peace and share the power of a positive perspective.