What are free products?

Access may be limited by server restrictions, but a website is a free good.

Free goods are goods that are readily available, without actual verification of their availability, at little or no cost to consumers. Air is commonly used as an example. Everyone needs air, but it is also easy to get and there are no consumption limits. Free goods can be produced in many ways and the definition can be a bit slippery; For example, economists might argue that air is not really a free good because society incurs costs to protect air quality, such as filtering chimneys to limit pollution.

One method of producing free goods is as a byproduct of making something more valuable. A company that grows rice, for example, grows it for the rice itself, but it also generates rice hulls, which can be burned for energy or used to make composite materials like planks. Waste products that a business would normally throw away can become free goods if they are valuable to consumers. Companies can, for example, discard shipping pallets that other people might use for fuel or construction projects.

Other free products are easy to reproduce at little or no cost. A website is an example. Multiple users can load a website at the same time and use its features without adding cost. It costs the same to design a website, regardless of whether it is used by 10 or 100 people. Access may be limited by restrictions on the server, but the website itself is still a free asset.

Certain other reproducible objects are technically free goods, but may be in short supply with legal protections. Books are an example. By itself, a book can be reproduced an infinite number of times, but the author can exercise copyright protection to control distribution and turn it from a free good to a rare one.

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In a rich society, free goods may be readily available. Between the waste generated during the production of things of value, freely distributed materials such as public domain websites and books, and other vast resources, members of society have access to various free products. Resource scarcity is more common in less prosperous societies, where all waste, for example, has value because companies need to get the most value from everything they produce. The rice company in this example would need to sell the waste products instead of leaving them for someone else to collect and use on their own.

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