The oldest business model on the internet
When the product is free, the transaction has not disappeared — it has moved. You are paying with the most valuable dataset that has ever existed about you: your questions, in your own words, in real time.
A rough valuation of you
- A heavy user sends thousands of prompts a year — a live feed of intent, worth far more per record than browsing history.
- Ad platforms price verified high-intent signals at dollars, not cents, per user per month.
- A year of your prompt stream, packaged as a profile, is plausibly worth hundreds of dollars — recurring, forever.
Paying with money instead
The alternative is unfashionably simple: pay for software, own the result. A one-time licence for a local-first tool costs less than what your data quietly earns for someone else in a year — and the asset it builds (your indexed, searchable knowledge) belongs to you.
Free is a price. Make sure you know which currency it is charged in.