Gary Miller here, and I’m convinced some people make decisions by throwing darts at a board. Last month, I learned this lesson the hard way when TechCorp bought out my biggest competitor and decided to give their business software away for free.
I’m sitting in my home office on a Tuesday morning, coffee getting cold, when my phone starts buzzing like crazy. Three different prospects texting me variations of “Hey Gary, saw the news about DataFlow going free – can we talk?”
DataFlow was our main competitor for years. Good software, similar features to what we sell, but they always charged about 20% more than us. Suddenly overnight, they’re free. Not cheap – free. As in zero dollars.
My first call was with Jennifer at MidCorp Manufacturing. We’d been working on a $180K deal for four months. She gets on the video call looking apologetic but determined.
“Gary, you know I like you and your software, but free is free. My CFO is asking why we’d pay anything when DataFlow does basically the same thing for nothing.”
I tried explaining that free software isn’t really free – there’s implementation costs, training, support issues. But try selling that to a finance team that just sees a big fat zero in the price column.
The next two weeks were brutal. I watched three solid deals evaporate faster than my patience during a Monday morning team meeting. Prospects who were ready to sign suddenly wanted to “explore all options.” Translation: they wanted free stuff.
Here’s what nobody talks about with free software – it’s still a pain to implement. I started hearing back from some of these companies within a month. Turns out when you don’t pay for something, the support isn’t exactly priority service. One guy told me he’d been waiting two weeks for someone to return his call about a basic setup question.
The real kicker came when I got a call from Jennifer again. MidCorp had spent three weeks trying to get DataFlow working with their existing systems. Their IT guy was pulling his hair out, their team was frustrated, and their CFO was starting to understand that “free” can be the most expensive option.
“Gary, can we revisit our original proposal? This free thing is costing us more in lost productivity than your software would cost us in three years.”
We ended up closing that deal at full price, plus some additional services to help them transition from the mess they’d created. But I lost two other deals permanently to companies that decided to stick with free, even when it wasn’t working well.
The whole experience taught me something important about modern sales. People still want to believe in magic solutions – whether it’s software that installs itself or competitors that suddenly give everything away. But business software isn’t about the price tag. It’s about solving real problems for real people.
Six months later, half those “free” customers are quietly shopping for alternatives. Turns out you get what you pay for, even in 2025. Some lessons never go out of style.
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