Last week we took a feature out from behind a paywall on Handee, the compliance system we built for multi-site property operations, and gave it to everyone on the free plan.
Suppliers do not usually volunteer that they have done this, so here is the reasoning and what it cost.
The feature, and who was paying for it
Handee had two sides: operators, the property and facilities teams it was built for, and vendors, the contractors and service firms who did the work. Operators sent jobs out. Vendors bid for them.
That week's release gave vendors a simple picture of how they were doing: how much work reached them, how much of it they quoted for, how much they won, and the difference between jobs they were invited to and jobs they found on the open marketplace.
We had built it behind the paid vendor plan. Twenty euro a month.
Why we moved it
On Handee, vendors were the supply side of a market. They joined free and left free, with no contract and no notice period. A vendor who decided that bidding through us was not worth the effort did not phone anyone to say so. They just stopped opening the jobs we sent.
The operator on the other side would see nothing for weeks. Then their jobs would start coming back unquoted, and by the time anyone asked why, the cause would be months old and invisible.
What an operator got from Handee was not really a piece of software. It was a pool of contractors who were verified, current on their credentials, and actually interested in the work. Charging the contractors for sight of their own numbers protected a twenty euro line and put that pool at risk. That was a poor trade even before you consider that the paid vendor plan was waitlist-only at the time, so the charge was collecting almost nothing anyway.
What it cost us
After the change, the paid vendor plan was a weaker product than it had been on the Monday. It kept a higher bidding limit, more user accounts and a longer record retention window, and it lost one of the few things that made it obviously worth buying.
We would rather have sold a thinner plan honestly than a fuller one that quietly discouraged the contractors the operators depended on.
The same question, asked about data
The other half of the release was the first marketing analytics we had ever run. Until that month we genuinely could not tell where a new signup came from.
Adding that raised an obvious question for anyone whose company data sat in Handee, so the answer was short.
Nothing a customer did inside Handee was measured by an outside company. Not a page, not a click. The addresses of pages inside the product contained the organisation's identifiers, its job references, and one-time links from invitation and password emails. None of that went anywhere near an advertising business, and there was no setting that would turn it on.
On Handee's public website, where the analytics did run, consent was off until a visitor gave it, and one click in the footer took it away again. We counted three things, and only three: someone signed up, someone confirmed their email address, someone started a subscription. There was no general-purpose tracker sitting behind those three waiting to be pointed at something else.
That had a price too. We could not watch how customers moved through the product in any analytics tool, so those questions were answered out of our own records instead, which took longer and cost more. We thought that was the correct amount of work for the promise we made.
Why any of this should matter to you
If you are choosing who to hand a slice of your operation to, the brochures will not separate the candidates. Every one of them will tell you what their software does.
The more useful question is what a supplier refuses to do, and what those refusals cost them. A company that has never turned anything down has either been lucky or is not telling you.
Ours are on the record. We gave away a paid feature because charging for it was quietly damaging the thing operators came to Handee for. We closed off a whole category of measurement about our own customers, and did that work the slow way.
The number we promise clients is the human time recovered on the work they hand us. A promise like that is only worth something from people who will also tell you what they chose not to do.
Handee was retired on 30 August 2026.