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Why We Built a Free Version: The Real Answer

People keep asking why we gave the product away. The short answer is the service network. The longer answer is that free turned out to be better engineering,…

Di Stasi Berry25 ottobre 202610 Tempo di lettura: min

Aggiornato25 ottobre 2026

People keep asking why we gave the product away. The short answer is the service network. The longer answer is that free turned out to be better engineering, better reach, and better information all at once.

A note from our founder. Published October 2026.

The answer I usually give: the service network

Service businesses don't work alone. They bring in partners and subcontractors constantly, for three reasons: the job needs a trade they don't do, the job is outside their area, or they're short-staffed that week. That isn't an edge case. It's how the industry actually delivers work.

And almost none of that coordination happens inside software. It happens in texts, phone calls, and paperwork. Someone retypes the same address and the same hours into two systems. Scope gets described out loud and remembered differently by each side. Photos sit in one person's camera roll. Details get missed, jobs run late, and the customer feels all of it without ever knowing why.

The reason isn't that nobody noticed. It's that the business model forbids the fix.

Traditional field service software is priced per seat. Every subcontractor you add is another line on your bill, for someone who isn't your employee and might work three jobs for you a year. Permissions get awkward, because that person shouldn't see your whole customer book. And the sub already runs their own business on something else, so even if you pay to add them, you've created a second place for them to type the same information. Plenty of entry-level apps don't offer subcontractor assignment at all, and the reason is commercial rather than technical: it's an obvious way around paying for seats.

Free dissolves the problem. When the app costs nothing and seats cost nothing, a sub can work inside your workspace at no cost to you, and keep their own business in their own free workspace on the same phone. No licence math. No pretending a partner is an employee. One shared source of truth for the work you share, and clean separation for everything you don't.

That's the part I want to be precise about: here, free isn't a discount. It's the thing that makes the arrangement possible at all. You cannot build a network of independent businesses on top of per-seat pricing, because per-seat pricing charges you for exactly the behaviour the network depends on.

The practical version of this is live today, and the honest limits are written up in Subcontractors Without Double Entry - One Free App Across the Companies You Work For. Sharing an individual job directly between two businesses is on our public roadmap and isn't built yet.

Free is what good engineering looks like

I believe more software should be free, and not for sentimental reasons. Building something that can be given away is a genuine engineering discipline.

If you can't bill per user, you can't let per-user costs exist. That single constraint forces you toward efficiency, and efficiency is most of what good engineering is. Your data lives on the device because that's cheaper and faster than hosting it. There are no accounts because accounts need servers. The app works with no signal because it was never depending on a server in the first place. Every one of those decisions makes the product better for the person using it, and we arrived at them because we'd taken the easy revenue lever off the table.

Constraints produce invention. Charging by the seat is the opposite: it's a lever you can pull instead of solving the problem. Pull it often enough and you stop looking for the cheaper architecture, because you no longer need one.

The economics behind this, and the rule we use to decide what's free, are in No Cheese in the Trap: The Rule Behind ToolBerry Free.

Free is a global language

Software priced in dollars is software built for people who have dollars. Across much of the world, a $79 monthly subscription for a two-person trade business isn't expensive, it's unthinkable. Those operators have the same problems as a crew in San Diego: scheduling, job history, getting paid, coordinating a second pair of hands. They're just invisible to a pricing page.

Free is understood everywhere. It needs no translation, no currency conversion, no regional pricing committee.

This matters to us for a reason that isn't purely commercial. Our team is international. Designing a product that only works for the US market would mean most of the people building it couldn't hand it to anyone they know. That's a quiet kind of alienation - building something you can't share with your own family or your own town. I'd rather the people writing this software be able to install it for a cousin with a van, wherever the cousin happens to live. That's also why the app has been bilingual from early on rather than as an afterthought.

Free tells us the truth

This one surprised me, and it's the reason I'd keep a free tier even if it never earned us a dollar.

If every user has paid you, every piece of feedback you get comes from someone who already agreed to your price, your positioning, and your assumptions. That's a filtered sample, and it's filtered in the most flattering possible direction. You end up optimizing for the people who already said yes and never hearing from the much larger group who bounced. Survivor bias, at product scale.

Free removes the filter. We hear from operators who would never have entered a credit card to be heard, in trades we didn't design for, in countries we hadn't thought about, on devices we didn't test on. A lot of it is inconvenient. Some of it has changed the roadmap. None of it would have reached us through a paid funnel.

For a product aimed at a specific, fairly small kind of business, that breadth is the difference between knowing your customers and guessing about them.

Free is a demo that runs itself

Think about what it normally takes for someone to genuinely evaluate field service software: a sales call, a scoping conversation, a trial that someone has to provision, maybe a proof-of-concept environment, and a human being shepherding the whole thing. That machinery exists because the product can't be experienced without it.

Ours can. Anyone can install the real product, with no account and no credit card, and run a real day of work through it. Not a sandbox, not a limited demo instance - the thing itself. That removes an enormous amount of cost and friction from the hardest part of selling software, which is getting someone to actually try it.

It compounds, too. People advocate for free things voluntarily. They post about them, recommend them in forums, mention them to the next operator at the parts counter - with no deal, no affiliate link, and nothing asked of them. It's worth noticing that a large slice of influencer marketing is companies paying to manufacture exactly that enthusiasm: give the creator the product for nothing, hope they talk about it. A genuinely free product generates the real version of that, continuously, without a campaign.

The synergies we didn't force

Here's what convinced me we were onto something true rather than clever.

Free, offline-first, mobile-first, and the service network all reinforce each other, and we didn't plan it that way. No accounts made free possible. On-device data made offline possible. Offline made it genuinely usable in the field, which is where this work happens. Free and no seat fees made a network of independent businesses possible. Each decision made the next one cheaper instead of more expensive.

That's unusual. Normally architectural choices fight each other, and you spend your time paying for one decision with another. When four of them keep handing each other advantages, it's a sign the underlying model fits the problem rather than that you've been smart. We mostly just stopped arguing with it.

The strategic part, honestly

I'm comfortable saying this out loud: free is also a competitive position, and in this market it's a strong one.

But I want to be careful about why, because the easy version of this claim is wrong. It isn't that incumbents are foolish or greedy. It's that a cloud-first, per-seat product genuinely cannot offer a real free tier. Every free user costs them money every month, forever, so a free plan has to be capped hard enough to be useless or it bleeds. Their architecture is the constraint, not their imagination. Put honestly: their model works, and it works because of the thing that makes free impossible for them.

Which means the gap isn't really about price. It's about technology, about who you target, and about where the product can physically work. Matching our price would be the easy part. Matching it sustainably would mean rebuilding on a local-first foundation, giving up the per-seat revenue that currently funds the company, and keeping the existing business alive through the transition. That's not a pricing decision, it's a rewrite plus a business-model change.

I think the realistic conclusion is that it would be easier for a large incumbent to buy a company that already did this than to become one. I don't say that as a boast - it's a fairly ordinary observation about how platform shifts usually resolve. It's also why I'm relaxed about publishing our reasoning. The thinking isn't the hard part. The decade of compounding architectural decisions underneath it is.

As bets go, it's low risk and high reward: it costs us engineering time rather than revenue we were already earning, and the downside is bounded. Those are the bets you take.

What it actually costs us

Free isn't free for us, and I don't want to pretend otherwise.

It costs engineering time, constantly. Every feature has to be solved within a tighter cost envelope than a funded competitor would accept, and sometimes that means months on a problem others would solve with a server and a monthly charge. It slows down revenue, because the obvious monetization lever is one we've chosen not to pull. It means supporting a large population of users who will never pay us anything, which we accept as the cost of the feedback and the reach.

And it means saying no sometimes. When we genuinely can't find a way to make something sustainably free, it goes to Pro, and the honest reason is that we couldn't figure out how to give it away.

Givers gain

The last reason is the least strategic and, if I'm honest, close to the most important.

It feels good to build something that a lot of people can simply use. There's a version of this industry where the best tools are only available to the businesses that are already winning, and the operator with one truck gets the stripped-down version at a premium. I don't want to work on that. Givers gain is something I believe about business and about life generally, and getting to run the experiment at this scale has been one of the more satisfying things I've done.

If that sounds soft next to the engineering and strategy arguments, fair enough. But I'd point out that every reason above arrived after the decision. I wanted to give something good away. The fact that it also turned out to be better engineering, better distribution, better information, and a defensible position is the part that still surprises me.

- Stasi Berry, Founder, ToolBerry

Have a question?

If you think any of this reasoning is wrong, I'd like to hear it: contact@toolberry.net.

ToolBerry is a free, offline-first field service management app for small service-trade businesses. Get it on the App Store or Google Play, or visit toolberry.net.