Software Development Blog

Weekly Newsletter Friday 23rd Jan 2026 - The Hidden Cost of Free Tools

Hi there, Rob here…

Everyone loves a free tool. You sign up, it works instantly, and it feels like you have outsmarted the universe. No budget meeting. No procurement. No monthly invoice quietly judging you.

But free rarely means cheap. It just means the cost turns up somewhere else, usually in your time. The hours spent setting it up, bending your process around it, and figuring out which settings you accidentally broke when you clicked something at 9pm.

The hidden cost tends to arrive in three stages. First, the limits. You hit a cap on users, storage, automations, or API calls. Then the workarounds. You start building odd little processes to dodge the restrictions. Finally, the complexity. Suddenly your “simple stack” includes three extra tools, a spreadsheet, and a person who is the only one that knows how it all fits together.

Free tools also have a habit of changing the rules. Features move behind a paywall, integrations get restricted, or support becomes a forum post from 2019 with one reply that says “same.” Nobody is being evil, it is just the business model. You are not the customer, you are the experiment.

This is not a rant against free tools. Some of them are excellent. The trick is knowing what you are buying with your time, and what happens when you grow. If the tool sits in the core of your business, it is worth paying for something reliable and boring. If it is a nice to have, free can be perfect.

👉 Free is great, until you start paying for it in hours.

Rob & Jason
Dev Partners

PS. We are Dev Partners, helping teams choose tools that scale without chaos. If you want a second opinion on your stack, give us a shout.