Who pays for the free one

Two friends in Beirut are building a booking app for small barbershops. The decision in front of them is not a technical one. It is whether to charge.

Giving it away is tempting, and the logic is sound. Once the thing is built, one more barber costs them almost nothing to serve. Free removes every reason to wait, so they could sign up half the city in a season. A barber who has used it for a year has his whole diary inside it and will not want to move. And the more barbers and customers who use it, the more useful it becomes for everyone, the kind of head start that is very hard to catch.

But free has to be paid for by someone. If the barbers are not paying, sooner or later the app earns from somebody else: whoever wants to reach their customers, rank higher in the list, or know who books what. At that point the barbers are no longer the customer. They are what is being sold. Every small change after that tilts a little towards the payer, and the app gets slightly worse for the people it was built for, who by then find it hard to leave.

Charging is slower. It will never cover the whole city in a season. But it keeps the two friends on the same side as the barbers. If the app stops being useful, the barber stops paying, so the only way to keep him is to keep earning him. The reason to stay is the work, not a lock on the door.

Neither road is wrong in itself. A tool built by a community for its own use can be free and stay honest. A cheap product can still serve its users well if enough of them pay. What matters is choosing with open eyes, because the decision the friends make about price now is a decision about who they will be working for later.