Is a free app actually free?

A free app is free the way the first month at a gym is free. Both technically true. Neither one the number that matters.

The deal is always the same. No monthly bill. Instead a small slice of every payment your clients make, something like nought point seven percent. Reads like a rounding error. And when you're starting out, it genuinely is one.

When free really is cheaper

Say you take two grand a month on card. 0.7% of that is fourteen quid. We'd charge you thirty. If that's your month, the free app wins, and anyone who tells you otherwise is reading from a script.

So we'll say it plainly: quiet diary, the free one's cheaper. Now the part the free one would rather you skipped.

The sum that flips

That percentage doesn't care how well you're doing. It takes the same slice off ten clients or fifty. Which means the better you get, the more it costs. Every month. For good.

And it never stops there. Double your business and the free app doubles its cut. A flat fee doesn't move. Thirty quid at twenty clients, thirty quid at fifty.

Why they still call it free

Because free gets the download, and a percentage is quiet. You feel a bill land. You don't feel 0.7% lifted off each payment, even in the months it adds up to more than a bill would. It's built not to be felt.

And it hides in your clients' money. Every time someone pays you, a little comes off the top before it reaches your account. Your money, taken in slices too small to notice, on the days you're busiest.

What you're actually choosing

None of this makes a free app a stitch-up. For a quiet week it's the right call, and we'd point you to it. It's just worth knowing that free comes with a bill, and the bill grows at exactly the speed you do.

We'd rather get out of the way of the growing than take a cut of it.