Why Most of My Apps Are Free, and One Is Not
· Matt Senter
People sometimes ask why I give so much of my work away. StockCar is free on iOS with no paywall. Comoji is free. Burly is free. And then there is Premail, which has a price.
That is not an accident or a mood. Free is a decision I make on purpose, and so is charging. Here is how I think about which one a product gets.
Free is a distribution choice, not a generosity contest
When I ship a small utility for free, I am not being charitable. I am picking the fastest path to the only thing that matters early on: people actually using the thing. A price tag, even a small one, is a wall. For a tool that lives or dies on whether it fits into someone's day, the cost of that wall is usually higher than any revenue behind it.
Comoji is a good example. It adds colon emoji shortcuts to the apps you already type in. The whole pitch is that it disappears into your flow. Nobody is going to open their wallet to find out whether an autocomplete feels right. They will try it for thirty seconds and either keep it forever or forget it. Free is what lets that thirty seconds happen at all.
The kind of product decides the model, not the other way around
I have come to sort my own work into two rough shapes, and the shape tells me almost everything about pricing.
The first shape is a small, self-contained utility. It does one thing, it runs on your machine, and once you have it, it mostly just works. StockCar, Comoji, and Burly all live here. They cost me real effort to build, but very little to keep serving to one more person. When the marginal cost of another user is close to nothing, charging per user starts to feel like friction for its own sake.
The second shape is a product that keeps working on your behalf, continuously, in a way that carries an ongoing cost and delivers ongoing value. That is where a price stops being friction and starts being fair.
Why Premail is the one that charges
Premail is a privacy-first email app that filters spam, recruiters, and noise before they reach your inbox. It is not a one-and-done utility. It works every single day, on every message, in the background, quietly deciding what deserves your attention.
That is a different deal than a menu bar helper. The value compounds daily, and so does the work behind it. A product that earns its keep in your life every morning is exactly the kind of thing that should be able to fund its own future, so it can keep getting better instead of quietly rotting. So Premail has tiers:
- a free tier, so the wall is never the reason someone does not try it
- a Pro plan at nine dollars a month for people who want the full defense running all the time
- a lifetime option at ninety-nine dollars for people who would rather pay once and be done
The free tier is there for the same reason all my other apps are free: to let people find out if it fits before anything is asked of them. The paid tiers exist because an inbox defended every day is worth paying for, and because a product I want to still be running in five years needs a reason to still be running in five years.
A studio can afford patience
None of this would work if every product had to pay for itself immediately. It works because these apps live under Senternet, which is part product lab and part consulting shop. The consulting side funds the patience the product side needs.
That structure is a quiet advantage. It means I do not have to slap a price on a tiny utility just to justify the weekend I spent building it. I can let StockCar, Comoji, and Burly be free because they do not have to carry the studio. They can just be good, spread on their own merits, and earn trust. The trust is the asset. It shows up later, in the products where a price makes sense and in the reputation that makes the next launch easier.
Free is not the same as cheap
I want to be careful about one thing. Free does not mean I put less into the free apps. If anything the opposite is true, because a free tool has to be good enough to keep on its own, without a subscription reminding you every month that you paid for it. There is no billing relationship holding a free app in place. It stays on your machine purely because it is worth the space.
So the bar for a free product is not lower. It is higher in a specific way: it has to be so genuinely useful that you would feel the absence if it were gone. That is a harder target than being worth nine dollars, and hitting it is the whole point.
The questions I actually ask
When I start something new, the pricing question is not the first one, but it is not far behind. A few things I ask before deciding:
- Does this do its job once, or does it keep working for you every day?
- What does one more user actually cost me to serve?
- Would a price help this spread, or is it just a wall in front of a good first impression?
- If this has to earn its keep to survive, is the value big enough that charging feels fair rather than grabby?
Most of my utilities answer those questions the same way, which is why most of them are free. Premail answers them differently, which is why it is not. The model is not a branding decision or a growth hack. It is just an honest reading of what the product is and what it is worth. Get that reading right and the price, or the absence of one, mostly picks itself.