When Free Comes at a Cost
Posted On: 2007-08-06
Most of us come into this industry on a shoestring budget. We don't have a lot of money and so we always go out and look for the cheapest options. Cheap is good but free is even better and if there's a free option then we're always going to take it because that's all we can afford.
And we find that free often does work - and work well - so we fall into the groove of thinking that we should never pay for anything if there is a free alternative. Why pay good money when we can get something for free? It makes sense doesn't it and it becomes embedded in our psyche.
Even when we are making bucket loads of money we still go out and spend as little as we can. We keep costs down to the bare minimum because that's what real businesses do and there's no better way of keeping costs down than using the free option whenever it's available.
But sometimes free really does come at a cost and that's a lesson we really need to learn if we're serious about doing serious business. When we buy something for free we may actually be getting a lot less value than what we paid for and when we discover that it could be too late. That freebie that looked like such great value and that we relied on so much could have just caused some nasty damage to our business and hopefully we'll see that before the damage becomes terminal.
Now if you've been caught with a free program that has actually cost you money then you're in good company because last week a lot of very serious businesses learned the same lesson you've learned. Last week a free program that lots of webmasters both here and in mainstream use stopped working for a while and that cost people real money.
Not only did people lose money because the program stopped working but some lost a lot of credibility because they had been foolish enough to recommend a free program to many of their important paying customers who didn't want things to go wrong.
And there was another lesson in what happened last week too. You see it doesn't matter who provides the free program - it can be a fly-by-night company operating out of someone's basement or it can be one of the biggest and most influential companies on the planet - if they're providing a free service then don't expect much help when the wheels fall off.
Last week Google Analytics stopped working and all of Google's spin doctors couldn't mitigate the damage that caused. It didn't matter whether the service went down for 30 minutes, or several days the fact was it went down and people lost a lot of important analytical data. And because the service was free those people who lost data got exactly the help that they paid for ... nothing.
Sure Google Analytics is a great program and it can supply you with amazing information about the way people interact with your websites but the bottom line is that it's free and when things go wrong you can't pick up the phone and get someone to fix it immediately. Last week it took some time before Google even admitted it had a problem ... and even then they only posted about it in one of their blogs.
But then what do you expect? If you don't pay for a service how can you expect to receive good service? That's something that has really caused some problems for those who recommended that their clients use Google Analytics.
There are some big spending clients out there who are now looking seriously at never taking advice from their web designers and search engine marketers ever again. These are the guys who were foolish enough to recommend a freebie to people who expect the best service when problems arise.
But it's not just those guys who were/are foolish ... it's so many of us too who place the future of our business in the hands of those who provide free services. How many of us here ... and in mainstream ... use Gmail as their email service? And how many of us never keep backups of important emails because they're always there and available to us on?
I'm just as guilty of that as anyone else and yet there have already been occasions when Gmail has failed some users. Not that long ago quite a few Gmail users found that, because of a technical glitch, all the emails in their account had been deleted ... and they never got them back.
How would that affect your business? How would you be able to deal with the hassles that would occur if your free analytics program took a dump?
Sometimes free is good and you can safeguard yourself from problems just by keeping backups of important files. Other times you need to take a deep breath and start paying for some services to ensure that you do get what you pay for.
In the case of the analytics problem no one at Google could be contacted directly when Google Analytics went down but if it was a commercial analytics program that had crashed help is usually only as far away as the telephone and you get to speak to real people.
Sure software such as good analytics programs can cost serious money but if they're providing good analysis of serious traffic for a serious business and there's someone you can call when problems arise then the cost is just a cost of doing business and one that we should always be willing to pay.
Sometimes the cost of something that's free is a whole lot more than the cost of something we have to pay for.