For almost every service you can think of, there’s a free version out there. This, of course, comes as a relief in the event that you can’t quite afford the paid versions. These free services are often comparable in terms of delivering the needs of users. However, free services aren’t all roses and sunshine especially if you intend to use them for your business. Great caution must be taken when engaging free services for business purposes and here are some things to consider.

Where are they cutting costs?

There’s usually some sort of cost associated with delivering products and it is usually nowhere near what paid services ask you to part with. That said there is some cost associated with it and thus free services incur these costs without compensation from you. They either have other ways of meeting these costs or they are cutting down in some things. While nobody will rush to reveal where exactly they are cutting costs do yourself a favour and seek reviews wherever you can get them. If they are cutting costs in an area like technical support it will then depend on how adept you are at that side of things. It’s not guaranteed that they are cost-cutting however and that brings us to our next point.

If not, how are they making money

There’s more than one way to skin a cat and there’s more than one way to make money. It’s possible that free services can operate on a number of frameworks that derive money from you indirectly. Freemium, Additional paid services and selling customer information are 3 ways this can be achieved. While Freemium and additional paid services may not be such an issue selling customer data is a huge one. The other issue, of course, is how they may not exactly be forthcoming with this. Due diligence can help to some extent. Selling customer data is not unique to free services.

Rights to material

There’s a recent rumbling I witnessed where a business created a logo using a very popular free creative application. The logo was based on a template available free to use in the software. This business made no alteration to the image in the template, they simply added their name. Another business announced its launch almost a month later with a logo based on the same template with no alterations. Business A was extremely upset with business B and did their best to scream bloody murder. In all honesty, both businesses had equal legal rights to the image and template assuming they both used the same software which is highly likely. Ultimately neither can cry fowl in such circumstances but this is a danger of using free services to produce material or create. Check carefully what the particular platform says about rights to material created on or uploaded to platforms. You may find your work being used by someone else but you will not be due compensation because of the terms and conditions of the platform.

Security

Security concerns are not unique to free services however something about a service being free encourages users to throw caution to the wind. Concerns over security are just as important in paid and free services. Business communication such as an email is an important example of this. You are looking after not only your personal information but that of customers, suppliers and other entities you deal with. A data breach on your platform may impact many other people negatively and the cost may be far much greater than the US$14.99 per month you were reluctant to part with in the first place.

Free rider problem

So you decided on the free service and it’s working just great until one day, it doesn’t. Or perhaps support has been really good with handling queries in a timely fashion and then it stops. The free-rider problem is where services get strained because of oversubscription by non paying customers. In a paid model the response to increased customer numbers would normally be to allocate more resources to each part of the business but in free models this isn’t always the case. If they scale suddenly the free-rider problem can occur. If this happens in a manner that impacts your business or at a critical time as tends to happen with such things this can break your business.

I love free services as much as the next guy and use quite a few. For business purposes however you want to think carefully about some things before engaging them.