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Comment by imperio59 | Hacker News Reader

If you get something for free then it has no value.

Remember the last time you got an item for free. You probably didn't worry too much about it, because it didn't cost you anything. You didn't treat it that carefully.

Compare that to something you bought for yourself, that you had to work hard for. You probably took a lot of care for it. You probably really paid attention to ensure it didn't break.

I feel like this is the mentality difference. Something free = no value = we can treat it badly. Something not free = it has value = we are more careful with it.

The nicest customers I have for my Saas product are also the ones who have the largest accounts. The ones that pay $15 a month for a single user on the cheapest account are always the ones asking for a list of like 50 new features to be implemented yesterday or "the product just isn't gonna work for us". Yea ok, because your $15 buys you a right to own my entire roadmap... not.

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I think you’re partly right but it’s not the whole story. People (not all but many) notoriously treat service/public facing workers horribly. The same people also treat those workers’ supervisors with more respect, or at least with less aggressive behavior.

They’re paying for whatever product or service they went in for. It’s not because something is free, it’s because they’ve designated certain people as servants.

I think there’s a pernicious attitude that the “free” part of open source is an entitlement to service, and that the people providing it are servants.

Interesting. I don't know if free = no value. Some of my most cherished things are gifts of relatively low replacement value.

I think products do have the ability to make us feel an emotional response, even when free?

I was going to write the exact same thing. It's even more extreme, I generally have much more problems parting with a gift, even if it is genuinely useless and holds no particular emotional value to me, just because it was given to me.

It might make sense but personally I tend to complain and ask for improvements if it's something I paid for, because hell, I PAID for it, I want it to work! If it's free as in beer, I care less about the quality (usually I thank the authors for releasing it for free).

I don't agree with the generalisation to private possessions.

Apart from gifts, as mentioned by another commenter, I often seem to value things higher and be more careful with them when I know they're valuable and I got them without having to pay.

How do you measure the value, though?

Setting aside emotional value I guess monetary value is a good estimate.

An example would be when I, through a misunderstanding, received two copies of a $16 promotional Magic card for free from my local game store. I tried explaining that they gave me something way more valuable than the free 30 card deck I had a code for. They just threw in that free deck as well and didn't want to hear it. The cards have since decreased in value somewhat, and I have other much more valuable cards, but the story of how I acquired them somehow make those cards feel very valuable to me.

Hahaha, but how do you know they are valuable? Maybe because normally, you would have had to pay for it? So you are saying, you are a freeloader?

> If you get something for free then it has no value.

Do you pay for the oxygen you breathe?

Or, in a competitive market price = marginal cost of production and the marginal cost be 0. Value to customers is a separate thing.

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