We live in an amazing time where our online lives are filled with thousands of innovative free services, many of which provide value to you every day. You rely on your free email to manage your life, you regularly use free mapping services to navigate to meetings, free review sites to find the best restaurant, free social media to interact with friends, free sharing services to upload photos, free calendars organize your time, free word processing to get work done, and more.
So is this trend going to extend beyond the internet? Will we soon be driving free cars, and taking free vacations to Italy? What's next? How is all this free stuff possible? And what is the real cost beyond the obvious selling of your data or your attention to advertisers?
Chris Anderson wrote a great book titled Free: The Future of a Radical Price, in which he explores this topic in great detail. He's very rosy about the future of free and has some interesting insights into how "Free" can be a successful business model for you. But his premise applies mostly to services that have a very low cost per unit and can scale infinitely.
Free or cheap services can provide affordable, generic tools, but for the foreseeable future they can't replace human intelligence, critical analysis, experience or creativity. And free services also simply become the new norm. You have to go beyond the status quo if you want to succeed.
Take websites as an example. There are hundreds of free open source CMS (Content Management System), and many other quality paid platforms that let you build a website. These provide businesses an opportunity to get "online" for the cost of a cup of coffee. That's wonderful, but this isn't 1999. There are billions of websites and simply being "online" will not provide a lot of value to your business. You won't stand out from the crowd. Most likely you won't even be found in search engines so your website will never see the light of day beyond your existing loyal customers.
So the entire business model of places like Squarespace, Wix and Weebly, is built around this illusion that you'll be successful if you can just finally get a website. It's not true.
Yes, they can provide you with a cheap website, but what is the value of a cheap website? It's a dead end. The true cost is loss of business, loss of market share, loss of leads, loss of customer satisfaction, loss of competitive edge, loss of time while your competitors leverage the full potential of a great website.
The truth is, you can't afford a cheap website. A great website doesn't need to be expensive, but if it provides more value than it costs it's worth the investment. You need to see beyond the immediate dollar amount and consider the value your investment will return to your business. You need a team that knows how to help you succeed online, that can build a beautiful website that is search engine and human optimized.