Is Your Free Software Costing You More Than You Think?

Free software has a certain appeal. Zero dollars upfront, no purchase order approval process, and you can start using it immediately. In 2026, you've got even more options: legacy free tools that have been around forever, open-source alternatives to everything, and now AI assistants that'll cheerfully generate building energy models if you ask them nicely enough.

But here's the thing about free. It's never actually free.

The Spreadsheet Tax

You know the drill. Someone on the team downloaded a free tool, got reasonably far with it, hit a wall, and now there's a spreadsheet. Actually, there are three spreadsheets. One converts the output format into something useful. Another reconciles differences between what the tool calculates and what the compliance documentation actually requires. The third tracks which version of which file is current because the free tool's project management features are, well, non-existent.

Those spreadsheets represent hours. Multiply those hours by your team's hourly rate, and suddenly "free" has a price tag. And that's before anyone goes on leave and nobody else can decipher the formulas.

The AI Experiment

Let's talk about the elephant in the room. In 2026, plenty of people are experimenting with ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever's flavour of the month for building performance tasks. "Just describe your building and it'll spit out an energy model!" Sounds efficient.

Except AI doesn't do building physics. It does plausible-sounding text. It can format things nicely, suggest approaches, even write scripts. What it can't do is guarantee that the thermal bridging calculation it just confidently explained actually complies with NCC 2022 Section J. Or that the daylight factor it calculated won't get torn apart in peer review.

You still need to check everything. Validate the assumptions. Cross-reference the standards. Make sure the outputs aren't just convincing-looking nonsense. So now you're doing the work twice: once to prompt the AI, once to verify it didn't hallucinate the thermal properties of concrete.

Support Is a Feature, Actually

Free software doesn't come with free support. That's not a criticism, it's just how it works. When something breaks, or you can't figure out how to model a particular construction detail, or the output file won't import into the documentation template, you're on your own.

You'll search forums. Read documentation that was last updated in 2019. Post questions and wait. Maybe someone responds, maybe they don't. Meanwhile, your deadline hasn't moved.

Commercial software has support because people pay for it. When you hit a problem at 4pm on a Friday and the report's due Monday, that support suddenly doesn't feel like overhead. It feels like a lifeboat.

The Integration Problem

Free tools tend to exist in isolation. They do one thing, sometimes reasonably or even very well, but they don't play nicely with the rest of your workflow. So you're exporting files, converting formats, manually transferring data between platforms.

Each interface is an opportunity for errors. Each manual transfer is time that could be spent on actual design work. Each workaround is technical debt that someone will have to maintain.

And when you do want to upgrade to something more integrated? Good luck migrating that project library you've built up over the years. File formats don't magically translate. Templates don't transfer. You're starting from scratch, except now you're also maintaining the old system until everything's migrated.

Scale Costs Money, One Way or Another

Free tools are brilliant for learning. They're often fine for one-off projects or simple cases. They fall apart at scale.

Maybe it's the lack of project templates. Maybe it's the absence of batch processing. Maybe it's just that running everything locally means you're tied to whatever machine has the software installed, and good luck collaborating with the team.

You can work around these limitations. People do it all the time. But those workarounds have costs. Time costs. Coordination costs. The cost of that one person who knows how to make everything work and becomes a bottleneck because nobody else wants to learn the arcane process.

What Are You Actually Paying For?

The question isn't whether free software costs money. Everything costs money, even if it's just time and frustration. The question is whether you're paying those costs deliberately or accidentally.

Better Building's total cost of ownership calculator breaks this down properly. License fees are one line item. But onboarding time? That's real money. Project setup and management? More money. IT infrastructure to run desktop software? Also money. Support requests that go unanswered? Opportunity cost, which is the most expensive kind.

When you add it up, "free" often costs more than the premium option. Not always. Sometimes free tools are legitimately the right choice. But not because they're free.

The Real Calculation

Before you commit to any platform, free or paid, run the actual numbers. How many hours will your team spend learning it? How much time goes into workarounds? What's the cost of delayed projects while you troubleshoot issues? What's your time worth when you're manually doing what an integrated platform would automate?

The software market in 2026 has more options than ever. Some are good. Some are free. Some are both. But "free" by itself isn't a feature. It's just the absence of an upfront cost, and upfront costs are usually the smallest part of the equation.

Your time is finite. Your deadlines are real. Your projects need to be right, not just convincingly formatted. Choose accordingly.