I’ve been building and selling software for about 25 years, and I’ve recently started wondering whether Ray might have understood something about the software business that we’ve forgotten.
In Field of Dreams, Ray Kinsella hears a voice:
“If you build it, he will come.”
Most of us remember it slightly differently:
“If you build it, they will come.”
So Ray builds a baseball field.
He doesn’t build the field and then put a gate around it.
He doesn’t offer you a 14-day free trial of the field.
He doesn’t let three people play baseball for free but require the Enterprise Edition if you want a full team.
He doesn’t ask for your email address before you’re allowed onto the grass.
He builds the field.
People come.
The software industry seems to have added another line:
“And when they do, put up a gate.”
That’s the bit we’re questioning.
The gate became the business
The software industry has become very good at controlling access to things.
Trials. User limits. Feature restrictions. Registration forms. Community editions. Professional editions. Enterprise editions.
We build something useful and then immediately start working out how much of it we can let you use before we need to stop you.
That’s understandable.
We’re businesses. We have employees to pay. Software costs money to develop, maintain, test and support.
Jadaptive is a business too.
But I’m increasingly questioning the assumption that the only way someone can provide value to a software company is by paying for the software.
Because that’s clearly not true.
A free user isn’t necessarily a free rider
Suppose you download one of our products tomorrow.
You run it inside your organisation. It solves your problem. You never pay Jadaptive anything.
Have we received nothing from that relationship?
Not necessarily.
You might find a bug.
You might request a feature we’d never considered.
You might deploy the software into an environment we’ve never tested.
You might tell us something about how you’re using it that changes how we think about the product.
You might help another user.
You might tell someone else about it.
Or you might simply use it successfully.
Even that has value.
Every real deployment teaches us something about whether the thing we’ve built actually works outside our own environment.
More users create more experience. More experience creates better software. Better software attracts more users.
The relationship doesn’t have to begin with a credit card.
And perhaps that’s where we’ve been looking at free users the wrong way.
The question doesn’t always have to be:
How do we convert this free user into a paying customer?
Perhaps sometimes it should be:
How do we create value from having this person as a user without requiring them to become a paying customer?
The Field of Users
That’s the experiment we’re starting at Jadaptive.
I’m calling it the Field of Users Strategy.
We’re taking useful infrastructure software and removing many of the artificial restrictions normally used to push people towards a paid edition.
No arbitrary user limits.
No trial countdown.
No registration just because marketing would quite like your email address.
If we’ve built something that solves your problem, come and use it.
This isn’t altruism.
It’s a business strategy.
We think there’s value in having people use the things we build, even when those people never become paying customers.
And we think there are things worth paying us for.
Expertise is one of them.
There will be organisations that need help deploying something across a complicated environment.
There will be integrations that don’t exist.
There will be unusual requirements.
There will be organisations that want support, consultancy, custom development or simply access to engineers who understand this stuff deeply.
That’s where we think the commercial relationship can begin.
Software is the gift. Expertise is the paywall.
We’re opening the baseball field.
Ray can sell hot dogs around the corner.
There is still a line
We’re not pretending we’ll never charge for software.
There are feature gates.
Some integrations and more advanced capabilities will be commercial.
Nodal VPN, for example, includes Active Directory integration in the free edition, while Google and Microsoft Entra ID integrations are paid features. Site-to-site networking sits on the commercial side too.
We’re not hiding that line.
We just want it to be a fair one.
If you’re already paying Google or Microsoft for the infrastructure we’re integrating with, we don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask you to pay us for our part of that integration.
If you’re building more sophisticated network infrastructure rather than simply giving your users secure remote access, there’s commercial value there too.
What we don’t want to do is deliberately hobble the basic product to manufacture a reason for you to upgrade.
You shouldn’t discover that the VPN works perfectly until employee number 11 arrives.
You shouldn’t find that the security feature you reasonably assumed was part of a production VPN only exists in the Enterprise Edition.
The free product should solve the problem it claims to solve.
That’s the line.
And we think it’s a fair one.
There’s actually a simple test we can apply ourselves whenever we’re deciding which side of that line something belongs.
Does withholding this feature prevent the free product from solving the problem we say it solves, or does the feature represent additional commercial value?
If the free product doesn’t genuinely solve the problem, we haven’t opened the field.
We’ve just moved the gate.
It should just work
There’s another consequence to this philosophy which I think is just as important.
The software has to stand on its own.
Infrastructure software isn’t particularly exciting.
A VPN is a VPN.
An SSH server is an SSH server.
A file transfer tool transfers files.
Nobody wakes up on Monday morning hoping to spend the afternoon evaluating VPN software.
They have a problem.
They want the problem to go away.
So perhaps infrastructure software doesn’t need 50 pages explaining its revolutionary approach to digital transformation.
Perhaps it doesn’t need a sales funnel.
Perhaps it doesn’t need a webinar before you’re trusted to touch it.
Perhaps it should just work.
That’s another phrase I’ve used for years at Jadaptive:
It should just work.
Download it.
Run it.
Solve the problem.
Get on with whatever you were actually trying to do.
The experiment has started
We’re already applying the Field of Users Strategy to the software we’re building and releasing.
Nodal VPN is one example.
It’s a self-hosted VPN built around WireGuard, with native clients, two-factor authentication, Active Directory integration, automatic configuration and key rotation.
And you can use it.
No user limits. No trial. No registration. A genuinely useful free edition, with a clear line around the commercial features.
We’re doing the same kind of thing elsewhere, and there will be more.
We’ll still announce products.
We’ll still make videos showing how they work.
We’ll still write documentation and explain the engineering.
But I think the more interesting thing to talk about might be the experiment itself.
Can a software company stop treating every free user as someone who must eventually be converted into a subscription?
Can we recognise the value of someone simply using our software?
Can we draw a fair line between giving people something genuinely useful and charging for the things that create additional commercial value?
Can we build a sustainable business around the expertise that created the software rather than putting unnecessary gates around the software itself?
I don’t know yet.
After 25 years of building and selling infrastructure software, I think it’s worth finding out.
Ray built the field.
The people came.
We’re going to build the software and let the users come.
And if you need us?
Ray Kinsella is selling hot dogs.