The internet is a very very big place, full of strange and wonderful pages. And then you run into things like DisposableWebPages. And you shake your head: no advertising, no link love (the pages disappear after 90 days), and just clever enough that they should have been smart enough NOT to do it. (My page is here. The password is “matilda” - feel free to add your comments if you like.)

There are a lot of sites like that out there that are just shake your head and keep surfing or stumbling. But there are some where you can see that people will depend on them and, then, one day they will disappear.

For example, OnlyWire, a system to semi-automate a small piece of the social bookmarking process. No revenue stream from ads. Lot of google link love, so maybe they’re going to do something with that in the future. Sometimes it goes down, who knows why, but it comes back up.

So what, you say, it’s free and it (usually) works.

Yeah, but your time isn’t free. Changing your business processes to use the site isn’t free. Changing them again when the site goes ‘poof’ isn’t free.

Oh, and as it is free, there is no TOS, no Privacy statement, no contract. So if something bad does happen with all the logins you put in…. Sure, you’re smart enough not to put your primary Digg account in there, but you know how they are on Digg - if there is a problem and it starts rolling back it could impact your business. And there is a cost associated with risk.

There is another kind of resource out there - things like Wikipedia. I’m sure most people don’t think about it, but it is an unprofitable not-for-profit. It’s not like it is going to disappear, but a lot of people depend on it and it sucks the oxygen out of the room for people trying to sell information. And it could, of course, disappear someday. I put the risk as low, but still.

Look, I’m not trying to pick on Disposable, Wikipedia, or OnlyWire, but I was really struck tonight about how we sometimes don’t think about the cost of using free services.

At our company we use a LOT of open source software, but only when the technology to fix it is in-house and only when there is a thriving support community. We buy lots of software from smaller widget manufacturers (we just got an AWESOME grid library for our new project) but only after we formulate an alternative plan just in case it’s, well, krep. And we watch those vendors carefully so that we can anticipate if they’re going to go out of business.

Maybe, if I had to, I would divide the free/cheap software world (in other words, nothing from Microsoft or Oracle in this exercise) into hobby, institution, or niche. Hobby stuff (OnlyWire) can disappear at any time - there are no visible economic or social (fame) drivers. Institutions have a certain amount of momentum so if they disappear, it’ll be a fading away. And niche, which can prosper for years though it is vulnerable.

We try to avoid the hobbyists, use the institutions, and watch our niche suppliers.