Read the top answers on that page and it's easy to distill down the underlying motivation behind a lot of developers: Fear. "All these angry customers will de

Read the top answers on that page and it's easy to distill down the underlying motivation behind a lot of developers: Fear. "All these angry customers will demand support", "Nobody will buy it", "It's not good enough to charge money for." It's all just fear of the unknown, and if they'd take the leap, they'd find that none of those things are true. The 3rd answer comes closest to explaining why I put some of my stuff out there for free: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/3233/why-do-programmers-write-applications-and-then-make-them-free/3243#3243 http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/3233/why-do-p... A good web application with a base of happy people using it, that was clearly built by you and only you, goes a long way towards proving your value for people who might want to do business with you in the future.