Literally spend money when you use technology, for the love of everything
If it is technology, you must pay money for it. That is the rule. It is an immutable rule of technology. This is the way things go and you have no other choice in the matter.
Are you using a new app? You must pay money for it. Did you sign up for a service? Money must be paid for it. Money helps the thing run. Money pays for the labor of designers & developers who do the necessary work of maintenance. Money helps business function in a way that serves your needs. There are no other gods.
Sometimes I write two paragraphs of text that cleanly explain the whole concept, and then I stare at an otherwise blank screen and wonder where else to go. Let’s clarify some things! Let’s go on an economic journey.
The principle
“If you aren’t the customer, you’re the product” is objectively true in the most egregious cases, but it’s not always true in the tech industry. Sometimes there is no customer, and the “business” is really being funded by venture capitalists in order to capture more market share. (Venture capitalists are not the customer.)
The goal is to be a customer. Businesses have customers. Customers economically support the business. If you don’t have customers, you are not a business. If you plan to have customers, you are not yet a business.
A year or so ago, somebody recommended that I look at a screen recording app. There was a question in there: how do you make money? They wrote some bad reply about how they are sitting comfortably and do not need money yet. Must be nice. I still use Claquette, which is software that I paid money for.
Bankrolling
Sometimes I use software that is bankrolled by other operations. For example, I paid over $10,000 on two Macs and an iPhone in the past year. In return, I am using iMessage, iWork, Apple Mail, and multiple operating systems for “free.”
I also don’t directly pay for some of the software I use. If a client is paying for Hotjar, I use their Hotjar. It still gets paid for, so everybody is happy.
$50 checks
If I want to use your service, but your business does not have a way for me to pay them with money, you don’t really have a business, but that won’t stop me. I find your incorporated address, mail a $50 check there, and hope you cash it.
Google and Twitter cashed my check, so I can use YouTube and Google Optimize while I post angry things to a fascist mouthpiece. Facebook has not yet cashed my check, so I can’t use their stuff.
Some businesses, like Mozilla & Signal, accept donations. I send them $50.
I avoid subscriptions
I pay one-time fees whenever humanly possible. This helps immensely with my business’s costing projections and overall cashflow. As a result, I don’t use a lot of products that I might otherwise consider.
I do not completely follow this
There are a few instances where I don’t pay for software with money.
- I did not pay for Discord until this past week, because my business was on fire. I felt guilty about this. I now pay for Discord.
- I once paid for Planta, but I stopped because it kept giving me todos that felt impossible, and also my plants kept dying when I followed them. Hilariously, when I don’t pay money to Planta, my plants die less often, and I find myself with more & happier plants.
- I don’t pay for Square Cash, but I do pay transaction fees to Square when I sell books & zines in person.
- I do not pay money to every website I load, that is preposterous. I do donate to many of them, like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive.
- People paste me stuff on Instagram and TikTok all the time, mostly on group texts. Most of it doesn’t load on my devices, but sometimes it does, and neither business cashed my check. Given the sheer volume of content blockers & ad firewalls that either service has to run through, it’s a miracle either load, and also I consider myself to be softly destroying them by sapping their bandwidth, which is an unconditionally good and correct thing to do.
- I pay for only one of the three Slack teams that I run or co-run.
I think that’s it.
I am the customer
The goal is to become the customer of technology, for all of technology. Technology should be a constellation of businesses that make tools to serve customers.
The industry has forgotten this. It will continue to forget this at the peril of civilized society.
I hope you have a wonderful day!