What a free household app actually costs

There is a version of this question under every household app: why pay for one when free ones exist?

It’s a fair question, and the honest answer has nothing to do with which app is better. Free is not a price, it’s a revenue model, and revenue models decide what a product turns into.

Who is the customer?

Every app makes money somewhere, and where it makes money tells you who it was built for. An ad-supported app earns when you look at it, so it gets designed to be opened often and to hold you once you’re there. An app that monetizes data earns by knowing things about you, so it gets designed to collect, and to keep collecting. A subscription app earns only if you’re still around in month six, so it gets designed to stay useful after the novelty wears off.

None of these is villainous. They’re different answers to the question of who is paying, and the answer shapes every decision that follows: which features get built, which get quietly dropped, and what happens to the thing you typed into it at nine o’clock last night. If you can’t figure out how an app makes money, that’s already the answer.

”Ad-free” and “doesn’t track you” are different claims

The obvious tell for an ad-supported app is that you can see the ads. That makes the absence of ads feel like a guarantee, and it isn’t one.

An app doesn’t need to show you a single ad to be worth a lot to advertisers. It can collect what it learns about your household and use it to target ads at you somewhere else entirely, in other apps, on other screens. The ads you never see in the app are the point. Researchers looking at this note that the lack of ads can give a false assurance of being free from data collection, when the collection is exactly what’s funding the thing. So “ad-free” tells you about the interface, and nothing at all about the plumbing.

Paying does not automatically fix this

The argument turns against me here, and I’d rather say it myself than have you find it out later.

A team of researchers at Berkeley, ICSI and IMDEA compared 1,505 pairs of free Android apps with their paid versions (opens in new tab) to see whether paying bought you anything. The results are not flattering to the paid apps. Forty-eight percent of the paid versions shipped with all the same third-party libraries as the free version. Fifty-six percent inherited all the same permissions to reach sensitive parts of your phone. Thirty-eight percent behaved identically when it came to collecting and transmitting data.

Only 45 percent of the pairs had a privacy policy at all. Fewer than one percent had a policy that differed between the free version and the paid one.

Their conclusion is blunt: there’s no clear evidence that paying for an app guarantees protection from extensive data collection.

My own reading goes a step further. A paid app running the same tracking libraries as its free twin is charging you for the download and monetizing you anyway, which is worse than either model on its own. So the price tag tells you very little, and the business model tells you almost everything.

”Free” usually means freemium

Very few household apps are actually free. Most are freemium, which is a different thing wearing the same word.

A freemium app’s customer is the version of you that upgrades, and everything in the free tier exists to produce that person. You’ll recognize the shapes it takes:

• The upgrade prompt that appears every third time you open the app.
• The limit nobody mentioned, which you find four months later when the shared list quietly stops accepting items.
• The feature you assumed came with the app, which turns out to come with the plan, and which you discover only after you’ve moved everyone in the house onto it.

That last one is the expensive one, and the money is the smallest part of it. By then everyone has learned the thing. Getting them all to move again is harder than paying, and a freemium app is built knowing that.

The study above is careful about this. It defined “free” strictly, as apps with no up-front cost and no in-app purchases, and it left freemium and paid-with-purchases out of scope. So the model that a great many household apps actually run on was never measured at all.

Why this matters more for a household app than a game

Most apps learn something narrow about you. A household app learns the shape of your life.

It knows when the house is empty, because it knows nobody’s home until six. It knows there’s a child, and which days that child gets picked up, and by whom. It knows what you buy, how often, and what you’ve stopped buying. It knows there was an argument about whose turn it was to do the dishes, because somebody left a pointed note in a shared list. Put a year of that together and you have a portrait of a family that no advertiser could assemble any other way.

No cause for alarm in that, but reason enough to be picky about who’s funding the thing that holds it. It’s also worth noticing that patching the gaps with five separate free tools means five separate answers to the question of who’s paying.

Subscription fatigue is a reasonable response

Most subscriptions don’t deserve renewing. Plenty of software that used to cost money once now costs money forever, and got worse in the process. A monthly charge is a standing claim on your attention and your bank account, and treating each one with suspicion is the correct instinct.

The test worth applying: does it still earn its place in month six, when the novelty is gone and it’s just another line on the statement? Most things fail that. The ones that pass tend to be the ones you’d notice missing.

What a subscription does do, when it’s the only revenue stream, is line up the incentives. If the only way I get paid next month is that the app is still worth paying for next month, then the app has to keep being worth it. That’s the whole idea behind Yem.

What to actually look for

You don’t need to read a privacy policy to make a reasonable guess. Five questions get you most of the way:

• How does this make money? If you can’t answer that in under a minute of looking, that’s information.
• Is it free, or is it freemium? If there’s an upgrade button, the free tier’s job is to make you press it. Find out what sits behind the paywall before you move everyone in, not after.
• Does “free” mean free, or free for now? An app with no visible revenue model usually has one it hasn’t switched on yet, or investors waiting for it to.
• Can you get your data back out? An app that makes it easy to leave is one that plans to keep earning its place.
• Does the privacy policy exist, and does it say anything? Fewer than half the app pairs in that study had one.

None of this is an argument that you should pay for a household app. If a free one works for your home, keep it, and don’t feel talked out of it. The only thing worth insisting on is that you know who’s paying, and what they’re getting for it. Sometimes it’s you, and sometimes it’s your Tuesday afternoons.

Yem is subscription only. No ads, nothing about your home sold to anyone, and you can export everything you’ve ever put into it, whenever you want.