Free is not a discount, it's a decision
Free is usually treated as a pricing tactic. You give away the first taste, get people through the door, and then convert them into paying customers once they are hooked. Free, in that story, is just a temporary discount on the way to a real price. But there is another kind of free that has nothing to do with any of that, and it is worth naming clearly, because confusing the two leads people to build the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. Sometimes free is not a discount off a price at all. It is a deliberate decision that the price itself is the barrier you exist to remove.
TechBridge Academy is free on purpose, and the purpose is the whole point. The people who most need help building a tech career in a new country are often the ones with the least to spare while doing so. Charge even a modest fee, and you do not simply lose a bit of revenue. You filter out precisely the people the program was built to serve, and you are left helping the ones who needed the least help in the first place. When access is the entire mission, any price, however small and however reasonable, quietly works against you. So the decision to make it free is not an act of generosity. It is the only way the thing can actually do its job.
Building free also changes what you are allowed to hide behind. When people pay, revenue becomes a comfortable proxy for value, and you can tell yourself that money changing hands means the thing is working. Take the money away, and that comfort disappears. You are forced to ask a much harder and much truer question, which is whether the thing actually changed anyone's life, because that is now the only measure you have left. Free does not lower the bar. It raises it, because it strips out the easy signal and leaves you with the real one.
None of this means everything should be free. Free is a decision with real costs, funded somewhere, by someone, and pretending otherwise is naive. There are plenty of products where a price is not a barrier at all but a signal, a filter that keeps out the people you should not be serving anyway. The discipline is in telling the two situations apart. Before you set a price, or decide not to, ask honestly whether the money is a barrier to the people you exist for, or a signal that helps you find them. Get that one distinction right, and the pricing decision mostly makes itself.
solveX is a product studio building digital tools for African and diaspora communities across Nigeria and the UK.