Software has struggled with the same problem for the last 3+ decades: users expect intangible value without friction, but companies need to capture revenue.

"Freemium" was the old solution, but it's a blunt instrument. It locks features behind gates, dangles capacity limits, and eventually pushes the user to pay or leave. For some categories, this works. For productivity software (and particularly tools that position themselves as platforms) the model feels misaligned.

I started thinking about alternative models after I read this series of Farcaster posts by Steph Ango (kepano), the founder of Obsidian:

Obsidian is neither freemium nor strictly donationware.

The app is complete at the point of download. No artificial constraints, no half-built experience. Instead, the business model rests on optional services: syncing, publishing, add-ons that exist outside the base product.

These extras have free substitutes - Dropbox can sync, GitHub Pages can publish - but Obsidian offers them as integrated, seamless choices.

You give the burger away.

The fries cost extra.

Open source lives in a give-first ethos, bolting on rev through support contracts, hosted versions, dual licensing etc. Evernote and Dropbox popularized freemium in consumer productivity, creating premium tiers that withheld features. But freemium undermines trust: users have been burned over and over by platforms that promise a free plan and then withhold critical features or - worse - paywall those features later after initially offering free access.

The Fries-With-That model avoids this trap by providing optional convenience, packaging + curation.

The burger satisfies the core need - calories, substance, the reason you came in. Fries are incremental revenue. No one feels coerced. You can walk out with just the burger, or you can spend a little more and round out the experience.

The economics of fries depend on marginal cost and perceived value. Potatoes are cheap, frying oil is cheaper, and the markup is staggering. In software, the equivalent is cloud infrastructure and developer time.

Syncing notes across devices requires servers, but economies of scale make each additional customer relatively inexpensive. Publishing a vault online needs bandwidth and maintenance, but once built, the incremental cost per user is modest.

What matters is that the value to the user is disproportionate. It's not hard to set up GitHub Pages, but it's a hassle. A one-click publishing service is fries: simple, obvious, worth the money.

When an app gives everything upfront, the user feels whole. They can commit to workflows, extensions, and personal systems without fearing a hidden wall. That builds trust. And trust compounds. Obsidian’s ecosystem of plugins, themes, and community vaults thrives precisely because the app itself is not a bait-and-switch.

Developers and power users know the foundation is secure. Optional services, when introduced, aren't perceived as extraction. The user is grateful that the business found a sustainable way to keep the lights on without breaking the covenant of free.

The Fries-With-That model solves the innovator’s dilemma in consumer software. By not gating the base product, you maximize adoption. Adoption leads to network effects, community contributions, and ecosystem depth. Once embedded, the user faces higher switching costs, because they've built genuine investment. The fries are presented when the user is already satisfied, when their willingness to pay is highest.

The company is motivated to make the free product excellent, because adoption is the funnel. The paid services must be genuinely valuable, because users always have alternatives.

Contrast this with traditional SaaS, where feature gating creates perverse incentives: bloat the paid tier, degrade the free one, and risk losing goodwill.

Fries rely on a significant base of satisfied users - without volume, the add-on economics fail - and they depend on offering services that are both high-margin and high-convenience.

A company will capture far less revenue per user than a traditional SaaS, which makes scale essential. Venture capital struggles with this, because the revenue curve looks flatter in the early years.

Once a company commits to fries, it's harder to introduce gates later. If Obsidian suddenly made local graph view a paid feature, the community would revolt. That constraint is both strength and weakness: it builds loyalty but limits flexibility.

All of which is to say - the Fries model likely works better for indie developers and indie apps than for companies insisting on blitzscaling.

Steph Ango’s is right: we need a new phrase. Freemium is inaccurate, donationware too limited. My take: Fries-With-That captures the spirit. The main course is fully satisfying, the add-ons are optional, and the company thrives by selling enough sides. It's a model rooted in trust, convenience, and scale.

Business models aren't neutral. They shape product design, user perception + company culture. Fries signal abundance. They insist that the product is good enough to stand on its own, but the business is smart enough to monetize around it.

The danger is complacency - fries are only valuable if the burger is excellent. When both line up, the model is sustainable, user-friendly, and strategically sound.

Software has moved from scarcity to abundance.

So how do we build sustainable businesses without betraying that abundance?

The Fries-With-That model is one answer. It gives weight to adoption, earns trust, and monetizes through convenience. It avoids the cynicism of freemium and the uncertainty of pure donationware. It fits a world where users are skeptical of lock-in but happy to pay for simplicity.

In a restaurant, a burger ain't free. The business model is predicated on selling you the core product at a price that already contains margin. Fries, soda, and dessert are high-margin add-ons layered on top of a revenue base. That is fundamentally different from software like Obsidian, where the burger - the core app - is free, and the fries are the only way the company generates revenue.

But the comparison holds value in another sense:

Both models are about psychology as much as economics.

Customers walk into McDonald’s intending to buy a burger, and when they're offered fries, the decision feels natural. In the same way, a user who has already embedded their thinking and notes into Obsidian is in the right mindset to purchase syncing or publishing. The base product creates trust and satisfaction, which is precisely the moment to present add-ons.