Freei

» see freei.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Freei sold nothing. You installed its dialer, the dialer called a local number, and you were online with a band of advertising sitting on your screen for as long as you stayed. Robert McCausland started the company in Federal Way, Washington, in December 1998, and for about eighteen months it looked like one of the better ideas of the era: over 2 million registered users by 1999, 3.2 million by the summer of 2000, fifth largest internet provider in the United States.

The company filed to go public on 31 March 2000, which was three weeks after the Nasdaq peaked and close to the worst timing available in the whole decade. The offering never happened. Freei withdrew it on 2 October 2000 with a filing that said market conditions meant it had determined not to proceed, and one week after that it was in bankruptcy court.

This model could not have existed where I was. In Turkey in 2000 the local call itself was metered, so a dial-up connection had a price per minute before any provider entered the picture at all. I paid Superonline or TTNet for the access and Türk Telekom for the minutes, and both bills came. The American version of dial-up, where the local call was flat rate and the provider was the only variable, is what every free ISP was built on top of. That condition never crossed the border, and neither did the category.

~ the record ~

~ the arithmetic ~

A free ISP pays for modem banks and upstream capacity and collects nothing per user. Every hour somebody stays connected costs money and returns whatever a banner impression was worth in 1999, which was not much and was falling. The model only works if the average user is light, and the users a free ISP attracts are the opposite of light, because people who pick free are people who plan to be on it all day.

Freei's answer was scale plus a second product. It layered on paid tiers and pushed its own dialer as an advertising surface rather than a utility. NetZero and Juno were running the same play in the same months, and those two survived by merging into United Online and quietly turning the free tier into a funnel for a paid one. Freei ran out of runway before it reached that step.

~ eight days in october ~

The ending is compressed enough to read as a single sequence. On 2 October 2000 the IPO was formally withdrawn, and one week later, with 30 percent of the staff already cut, the company filed for bankruptcy. The rest of the employees went on 16 October and the Federal Way headquarters closed permanently the same day. By the first week of November what remained was going out at auction, and the FreeInternet.com name was picked up by United Online, which already owned NetZero and Juno and eventually turned the domain into a page of retail offers.

Three point two million registered accounts stopped dialing in the middle of a month, most of them with no notice worth the name, and the thing they lost had never cost them anything, which is why the story left almost no trace. There is no farewell page in the archive and no community that stayed together afterward. A free product has no customers to be angry about it, only users who go and find the next free one.

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