Out with the old, in with the new. It’s the season to clean house.

A quick look on Craigslist shows plenty available in my area for free.

I have a choice of threadbare, “cozy” couches if I make the trek to the poster’s corner of the metro area. Live plants, dead plants, and live animals are all available for no charge (the taxidermy all appears to have a price).

For the cost of a rental van and a sore back, I could have any number of out-of-tune pianos in the Portland vicinity.

Some of these free listings go viral beyond their quirky corner of the internet. For example, there’s this combination fireplace / radio / record player / 8-track, with a warning that it is “MUCH HEAVIER than you would imagine a fake fireplace has any right to be.”

Or a free snowman that does not include the bucket:

Scroll around these postings and you might have a new appreciation for the cost of free.

Devs themselves expect to try your product for free, if not get limited use forever with an unpaid pricing tier.

Freemium and even trials get a little more expensive in the AI age. Any features that tap into LLMs are not as cheap to run as standard cloud software.

It’s likely a worthwhile investment for the right developers, who might become paying customers in the future.

But how do you separate them from the freebie seekers trolling for a new old couch?

For most dev tools, you no longer want to attract all of the developers. Instead, understand what the right devs need, and appeal to them. Show you can solve their problems. Uncover and analyze their use cases. Put yourself and your product in the places where the right devs go.

And, in most circumstances, stay away from Craigslist free.