I give a training programme away. Twelve videos, four weeks, no charge, open to anyone. People assume this is a loss leader, and that the real product waits behind it.
The reason it can be free is duller than that and it is worth stating plainly, because it is the test I now apply to everything.
The actual test
The programme is recorded. It is asynchronous. There is no live call, no cohort to hold together, no assignment to mark, and no inbox I personally answer. Once it is built, one more participant costs me nothing. Not nothing in money. Nothing in attention.
The moment any one of those changes, the thing is no longer free. It is unpaid. A live session in a free programme is an hour of the scarcest input in the business, given away on a schedule set by somebody else. A marked assignment is worse, because the marking is what makes the promise real and the promise is what brings the next cohort.
Why attention and not money
For a small operation, money and attention fail differently. Money problems are visible, arithmetical and can be fixed in a quarter. Attention problems present as being busy and doing well, right up to the point where nothing has compounded in a year and every piece of revenue still requires you personally in the room.
Once you price in attention, several decisions stop being difficult. A free tier that is recorded and open is generous. A free tier with a calendar invitation in it is a slow refusal to charge. A discovery call offered to anyone who clicks is not marketing, it is a queue that anyone in the world can join for nothing.
Where I got this wrong
For years I sold time. It worked, in the sense that invoices were raised. It also meant every good month was a month I had personally filled, and a bad month was structurally identical to a holiday.
The fix is not to stop doing work that takes time. Some of the most valuable things I do are hours in a room. The fix is to know which things are hours and to stop pretending the free ones are free when they are hours with no invoice attached.
If you want a single question for your own version of this: if a hundred more people accepted your free offer tomorrow, would anything on your calendar change? If yes, it is not free. You are just not charging.