A Reasonable Suspicion

The skepticism is fair. The free app that sells your location. The free service that turns your attention into ad space. The free tool that becomes a subscription trap the moment you rely on it.

So the natural reaction, with a free tool like BidWix, is to wonder what's being traded behind the curtain. I understand that reflex. And I want to explain why, here, you can relax.

First, you may have noticed that BidWix doesn't require an account, and email is optional. You can use it right away, anonymously. That isn't an oversight. It's a choice. Most sites hide the useful part behind a signup gate, because your data is the price of entry. I didn't want to build that kind of gate. And on its own, that should already give you some confidence about the spirit of the project.

The Internet I Miss

When I finished my engineering studies, we were given something that felt almost magical: an email address. This was 1993. Suddenly you could write to someone at another university, in another country, and it cost nothing. It felt like the planet had shrunk to the size of a village overnight.

Then came the Web. At first it was a library: pages you could read, ideas you could share. Later it became a toolbox: people started putting actual utilities online. I remember that era very clearly. It felt like a collective craft project, strangers making things for other strangers because it was possible, and because being useful felt good. The early Internet came out of academic culture, and that culture was simple: share knowledge, help each other move forward.

What happened after that, the slow decay of platforms into extraction machines, as Cory Doctorow named it, is real and depressing. But it isn't inevitable. It's a choice, made by people and companies. I still believe that the Internet is a reflection of what people choose to make it: a place of extraction, or a place of exchange. I chose the second a long time ago, and I've never found a good reason to change my mind.

This Isn't My Income

I'm not trying to build the next big thing. I already have a thing: myNoise, a sound website I've run alone for over a decade, funded by donations, used by about 15,000 people every day. That's already a full-time job. More than a full-time job, honestly. And it's enough.

I also didn't take the short path. I did a doctorate in engineering, worked serious jobs as a signal processing engineer, and then I walked away from that world to follow a long-time interest of mine: sound design. That's a pattern in my life. I follow what genuinely pulls me. myNoise was born from that same impulse.

I never quite knew what to charge for myNoise. Pricing has always felt like an uncomfortable exercise to me. The "right" price depends on too many variables, and most of all on who the listener is. What feels trivial to one person is a stretch to another. Marketing usually answers this with tiers: split your product into levels and match each level to a wallet size. But that also means many people get a deliberately limited version. I don't like that logic. So I went for something that felt more human: the full experience, open to everyone, and a donation model for those who want to support it. And somehow, it worked.

That experience shaped how I build. I don't need BidWix to pay my bills, myNoise already does. BidWix is a small side project, running on simple infrastructure that costs very little. The pressure that turns "free" tools into traps simply isn't present here. So I can let it stay simple, live its own life, and just help people if it does.

An Engineer's Solution to Haggling

There's also a more personal reason. I've never been good at selling myself. Negotiation has always felt like a game where the winner is the person who bluffs best, resists longest, or enjoys the fight more than the other person. I don't enjoy it. I never have. And I've always been average at it, probably because I can't bring myself to spend the time it takes to "get good" at the dance. Every hour spent haggling is an hour not spent building. I'm an engineer at heart. I'd rather make the thing than argue about its price.

So yes, it might look odd that I spent time thinking carefully about negotiation, and then built a tool around it. But that's exactly why I did it. I built BidWix to make negotiation unnecessary, to replace the bluffing ritual with something more honest and, I think, more fair. If you want the reasoning behind the method, it's explained in the companion article.

Monetizing BidWix would push it toward the very kind of Internet I want to escape. I'm not against adding a donation link for people who find it useful and want to support an independent developer. But right now my audience is too small for that to matter, so I won't even bother with it yet.

The Point of Building It

So what do I get out of it? The same thing I've always gotten from building things on the Internet: the satisfaction of putting something useful into the world and watching people use it.

Negotiation, as it's currently practiced, is a power game dressed up as compromise. The outcome depends less on fairness than on who bluffs better. I've always found it uncomfortable. But not playing the dance puts you in the weak position from the start. I wanted to change that. To find a paradigm where you could settle a deal in one honest round, and walk away knowing the outcome was genuinely fair to both sides.

If BidWix can offer a small exit from that, a way for two honest people to reach a fair price without the theater, then that, to me, is gratifying. Seeing it used. Seeing it work. Maybe, slowly, opening a different way of thinking about what a deal can look like...

That's the catch: there isn't one.

Stéphane

P.S. You may also wonder what kind of deals BidWix works best for (and when it doesn’t). I wrote a practical guide here: When There Is No Right Price.