The economics of free

Nothing is free; some things are only free to the person using them. FitForm League costs a student nothing, and it is worth understanding where the money actually goes, because that is the difference between a school project that survives the year and one that quietly disappears.

Start with the costs that do not change with the number of users. A domain name costs about twelve dollars a year. A small virtual server with one processor and one gigabyte of memory costs four to six dollars a month. The pose model is published under an open licence and costs nothing to use. Code hosting is free for public projects. Add the electricity for a tablet the school already owns, and the fixed cost of running the whole platform is under a hundred dollars a year — less than one pair of football boots.

Now the costs that grow. Each extra student adds a row in a database, a few kilobytes a day of score data and a handful of requests to the server. Because the expensive part — the AI — runs on the student's own device, the server never has to process video. The marginal cost of the thousandth user is therefore close to zero, and that single architectural decision is what makes a free product honest rather than a promise that will later be withdrawn.

What does grow with scale is human time. Someone has to print and laminate FitPass cards, show a new class how to stand, answer the message when a tablet will not open the camera, and decide what happens when two classes disagree about a score. In a company these costs would appear on a payroll. In a school club they are paid in evenings and weekends by three students and one teacher, which is a real cost even though no money moves. Any plan that ignores it is not a plan.

Economists would call the platform a public good inside the school: one student using it does not stop another from using it, and nobody can easily be excluded. Public goods are famously under-supplied by markets, which is precisely why no company has built this for secondary schools. The market is small, the buyer is slow, procurement rules are strict, and the price a school can pay is close to nothing. A commercial team would need a sales person per province; a student team needs a laptop and a free afternoon.

Being free also changes behaviour in ways a low price would not. A subscription, however cheap, creates a decision: someone must ask permission, compare options and justify the spending. Every one of those steps loses users. Remove the price and the only remaining cost to a new class is attention, which a good first session can win in ten minutes. That is why the team measures how many students finish a first session rather than how many open the home page.

There is a risk in all of this, and it should be stated plainly. Free products that depend on volunteers are fragile. The three founders will finish grade nine. If nothing is written down, the project ends with them. The answer is not revenue but documentation and hand-over: a file that explains how to deploy the server, a guide for new students, a club constitution that says how leaders are chosen, and a budget small enough that a parents' association could cover it without a meeting. Sustainability, for a school platform, is less about money than about making the next team's first week easy.