A Conversation We Need to Have About Sustainability, Privacy, and Value.
As a teacher, I get it. I really do.
We’re constantly swimming in a sea of “free.” The siren song of the latest free tool, free AI feature, or free professional development course is impossible to ignore. We sign up with genuine excitement. We share it with our colleagues. We evangelise it on social media and champion it in staff meetings. We build entire resource packs and CPD sessions around it.
And why wouldn’t we?
Free feels powerful. Free feels like empowerment. Free feels like it’s leveling the playing field for our students and our schools.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: “Free” is a myth. And it’s a myth that might be costing our profession more than we think.
The Hidden Invoice: Deconstructing the Cost of “Free”
When a tool or service is offered for free, the costs don’t simply vanish. They are shifted, often into shadows where we are conditioned not to look. More recently this has become very clear to me as I have been working on my own webapps and developing these comes a number of costs that may not be apparent to those using them. The domain, the hosting, and the traffic to and from the database. Everything has to be paid for and often out-of-pocket before any traffic has even come to your websites. And there are other costs as well. Someone, somewhere, is paying.
- The Financial Cost: The developers who code through the night, the team maintaining the servers, the support staff answering emails, they all deserve to be paid. Without a sustainable financial model, the tool we love today becomes a ghost in the digital graveyard of abandoned EdTech tomorrow. Many startups and EdTech products have seen this happen when released with no clear scalable plan or monetisation strategy.
- The Data Cost: This is the most insidious price. When we don’t pay with money, we often pay with data. Our data. Our students’ data. In the “free” model, the user is not the customer; they are the product. Our usage patterns, our content, and our students’ engagement metrics are aggregated, anonymised (sometimes), and sold to advertisers or data brokers. This raises profound ethical questions about student privacy and digital citizenship.
- The Venture Capital Endgame: Many “free” platforms are backed by venture capital with a simple mandate: grow at all costs. Their goal isn’t pedagogical excellence; it’s market domination. They offer a fantastic free product to onboard millions of users, eliminate competitors, and become indispensable. Once they achieve that scale, the endgame begins: sudden price hikes, core features moved behind aggressive paywalls, or an acquisition by a larger corporation that may not share the original creators’ values. Again, this has happened countless times in recent years.
We, as teachers, are masters of sharing. We upload lessons to shared drives, distribute editable templates, and build communities that thrive on generosity. It’s the best part of our profession. But we cannot project this beautiful, collaborative ethos onto the entire tech industry and expect it to work. The small, mission-driven teams with big ideas and privacy-first principles cannot compete if we perpetually demand everything for nothing. Back to the idea and example of my own apps.
Walking the Tightrope: A Creator’s Journey
I say this not as a detached critic, but as someone living on this very tightrope.
I run a website where I share tutorials, templates, and resources freely. I pour my time into it because I genuinely believe in access and in lifting up my fellow educators, you are probably reading this very article on that website. But it is not “free” for me.
- The domain name costs money.
- The web hosting costs money.
- The software I use to create the resources costs money.
- And the time, that is the greatest cost, drawn from evenings, weekends, and holidays.
To make this sustainable, I’ve embraced a model of optional support. I have YouTube Memberships and a Patreon, where for a small monthly contribution, community members can get perks like early access to videos, ad-free tutorials, or priority responses. As part of my new webapps project, Patreon supporters will get access to all premium features of those webapps as well. However, if the scale and data traffic grows to a measure beyond what I’m able to pay for ‘this hobby project’, there are two options; offset the cost with additional paying support, or kill the app.
In the case of my website, critically, nothing is hidden behind a paywall. The resources remain free for everyone. The choice to contribute is 100% optional. But uptake is slow, very slow even if it is the cost of a fancy Latte of Coffee each month. And I understand why! I hesitate before subscribing to things, too. Which brings us back to the central dilemma.
A Personal Reflection on Paying for Value
I try to practice what I preach. My own digital toolkit is a conscious blend of free and paid services.
- In my professional life, I advocate for our school to invest in high-impact tools. Our department budget purposefully funds subscriptions to White Rose Maths, Phonics Tracker, and Star Reader. We use Clicker for SfL support and have a Widgets Subscription. We don’t just buy them once either; we evaluate their effectiveness using a Subscription Evaluation Framework I developed to ensure we’re getting a return on our investment in the form of student progress and teacher well-being.
- In my personal creative work, I pay for a Canva Pro account for its flexibility and a Camtasia subscription that saves me countless hours. I also subscribe to several creators on Patreon whose work I admire and want to support. I pay more Cloud storage with both Apple and Google and have numerous domains and hosting.
- As a consumer, I pay for YouTube Premium, not just to skip ads, but to ensure the creators I watch receive a share. I subscribe to streaming services such as Netflix, HBO, Disney+, Storytel and more, because I value quality, ad-free content and enjoy having access to new content regularly. I have access to Codemonkey and DuoLingo Family as well as a number of other educational platforms in addition to these.
Each subscription is a deliberate choice, an investment in a product, a service, or a creator I believe in. It’s a vote for the kind of digital world I want to live in.
Redrawing the Line: Towards a Sustainable EdTech Ecosystem
The angry comments I see on YouTube videos showcasing a paid tool are a testament to this tension:
- “This looks great, but I can’t afford it.”
- “Our school has no budget for this.”
- “I only use free tools in my classroom.”
- “Why are you showing us the premium features!”
- “I don’t want to pay, how can I get this for free?”
These are real barriers born of systemic underfunding and deserve our empathy. But they also corner us. If schools won’t pay and teachers can’t pay, who is left to build the future of education technology? Are we content to cede that ground entirely to VC-backed giants with questionable motives? Do the Big 7 determine what will happen with education and the erection it takes?
What happens to the small teams who offer human support? The Privacy-first platforms like Kagi? The innovators who are also teachers?
The solution isn’t a simple binary of free vs. paid. It’s a spectrum of more honest models:
- The Patronage Model: Free for all, with optional paid support for those who see the value and can afford it (e.g., Patreon, YouTube Memberships).
- The “Good” Freemium Model: The core tool is genuinely free and useful, with premium tiers that offer powerful, non-essential features for advanced users or teams. (This is what I’m trying to do with my tools AskStream.app and Yupse.com)
- The School/District License Model: A transparent, upfront cost for a product that provides robust support, respects privacy, and offers equitable access to all staff and students within that institution.
A Call for Conscious Consumption: What Can We Do?
This isn’t just a post with questions; it’s a call for a shift in mindset. It’s time to move from being passive consumers to conscious investors in our professional toolkit.
For Individual Teachers:
- Ask Critical Questions: Before adopting a “free” tool, ask: Who made this? How do they make money? What is their privacy policy? Are their Terms of Service readable and acceptable?
- Budget for Value: Consider budgeting for one or two high-impact subscriptions a year, just as you would for a professional development book.
- Champion Good Tools: When you find a paid tool that saves you time and improves learning, build a case and advocate for it with your school leadership.
- Champion innovation: If within your means find the people creating value and support them with your time, feedback, and yes sometimes a small gesture of support.
For School Leaders & Administrators:
- Create Flexible Budgets: Earmark funds specifically for teacher-requested software. Trust your staff to identify what they need.
- Prioritise Ethics Over Price: When evaluating software, make data privacy and customer support non-negotiable criteria. This is KEY! Too often does price become the main, or only evaluated factor.
- Develop an Evaluation Framework: Implement a system to assess the ROI of subscriptions, focusing on impact, not just cost. Or you can use mine: SUBS
Where Do You Stand?
This conversation is complex. It balances the beautiful generosity of the teaching profession with the harsh realities of business sustainability. It forces us to weigh convenience against privacy, and immediate cost against long-term value.
Let’s not stop sharing. But let’s start building something that can last. Let’s shift the defining question from “Is it free?” to “Is it worth it?”
Let’s talk about it, and see if we can find some common ground?
- Are you happy with the freemium/premium models you use?
- What paid educational tools do you believe are worth every cent you’ve paid?
- Where do you draw the line between a gift to the community and an unsustainable business model? Maybe some examples jump to mind.
In my opinion, the future of EdTech should be ethical, sustainable, and student-centred. That future has a price, and it’s time we decide what we’re willing to pay for it.