At Armada, Spencer developed a better Korean skin analysis model — it tells you what colors look best with your skin color. Genuinely, really really good product. All the girls deadass said they would've paid for it. I lowkey might have too (I'm cool winter). But Spencer said he wanted to open source it. Off pure knee jerk, cigar smoking, freedom units measuring, capitalistic instinct, I said No! Spencer wanted to open source because he tried looking for a good free color analysis tool, but couldn't find one. He especially hated how all the good ones cost money —> he wanted to solve his own problem.
However, there isn't much overlap between the type of people into Korean skincare undertone color matching analysis and the people who sift github repos for fun. Realistic best case: ~100 people try Spencer's model. Meanwhile there are a dozen color analysis apps printing +50k MRR but are just GPT wrappers not even a custom trained model that delivers actual good results like Spencer's.
Obvious retort: Why would a superior free product only get 100 users and an inferior paid product get tens of thousands of monthly downloads? This occurs because distribution matters more than product for most consumer companies. Take CalAI for example — made by a 17 year old boy and a dude who got no internships or job offers in/out of college. CalAI is a GPT wrapper that guesstimates how many calories are in your food — it generates over $2M and +500k downloads every month. There exist many free CalAI carbon copies that have less than 100 downloads. The difference between the two apps is not product but rather distribution. When an app monetizes verus is free, the monetized app can use its profits to supercharge its marketing while a free app's growth will be left behind. This becomes cyclical as paid apps get more users and use that money to get even more users and money → leading to CalAI type disparities
Given:
1. Spencer's model delivers superior results than the GPT wrappers printing +50k/mo
2. (assuming similiar product) Apps that charge money obtain more users than free apps because the monetized app will win on marketing
I'd say it is (morally) better that everyone currently paying for the GPT wrapper to rather pay for Spencer's model. Also, I'd say that the benefit to the hundreds of thousands of GPT wrapper users is better than 100 people using Spencer's model for free.
Which is why (assuming capitalism), in most cases, monetization is the most moral behavior.