I've always liked 37signals as a company a lot and today they just shattered my affection for them into pieces.
We're a small group of volunteers teaching programming at a university in Bulgaria. Today we asked 37signals if they would provide us with a free Basecamp account. The account would help us coordinate our team teaching efforts and let us provide the students with more knowledge more efficiently.
As we're not getting paid anything for this by the university (although students get credits for our courses) and as we don't have any budget for course expenses (on the contrary—we pay from our own pockets in order to bring Ruby, Python and Clojure to the curriculum), we asked for a non-trial basic account pro bono.
Our request got rejected.
I learned that 37signals' policy is to not give away any free accounts. The response we got from their support team suggests that they get asked similar questions quite often, because the better part of the reply sounded pretty generic and copy-paste friendly.
Their general position as a company is well reflected in this tweet by DHH:
We price our software to make it affordable whether its a small company, a nonprofit, or just someone using it for personal use.
We can't dispute 37signals' policy regarding free accounts. We can just accept it.
However, I always thought their position would be different. I had another impression of their guiding principles. And learning the truth brought me to the ground hard. I still have a sour taste in my mouth because of this. It's like I've lost a friend.
37signals is not a new name for me. I've been a user of their products for a few years now, including both the old Basecamp, as well as the new Basecamp Next (BCX) and I've been pretty happy with them. I'm also a Ruby on Rails programmer and follow with a modest degree of interest the public activity of 37signals' DHH, Sam Stephenson, Nick Quaranto and others. You can say that I admire their work and their knowledge, as I'm sure many other fellow programmers do. I also support most of their publicly shared life views.
I've always loved that all of them, the people behind 37signals, are trying not only to be a successful and profitable business, but also to push the industry forward. They do this by creating great products, by constantly improving their processes, their tools, the software they create and also by contributing a considerable amount of that software to the Open Source community. This pushing the industry forward and making the world a little bit better is what I thought was a guiding principle in 37signals' philosophy.
Their response to our inquiry brought me into the harsh reality of profits versus idealism.
Being profitable is hard and conflicts with most of the idealistic purposes in life. A "non-evil" company must struggle to keep a balance between the two. I completely agree with their open pricing model and their position that everyone should be treated equally in terms of pricing.
However, I think that "free" is not a price, it's a principle. It doesn't fit in a pricing model, it's a separate thing.
Our group of volunteer lecturers will never profit out of using Basecamp. What we could achieve via Basecamp is simply better organization of our teaching efforts and a possibility to do our part of the global push forward of the software industry a little bit better.
GutHub had a different position on this. They have provided us with a free private account for our teaching needs and we're very thankful to them for that. They supported our cause. We thought we would receive the same ideological support from 37signals, too. It's not about that $20 per month for the basic account we asked for (although $20/mon is not a negligible amount here in Bulgaria, especially if you're not a business and have no income).
It is a matter of principle and ideology. Do you support this cause or not?
37signals is a company which values its profits and they don't support such causes. I don't understand very well why. It's clear that with nearly 15000 new projects each week they're not struggling for a market share. The only thing left for me is that they're not the company I thought they were.
And that breaks my heart.