When something is free, it has no value and people treat it as such. When I
worked at a hospital in Boston, we used to offer “free” printing to
everyone in our small division — 1000 people were generating printing
costs of $100,000 per year. You just sent a job to the printer from your computer and it printed. No charge to anyone.

The administration was unhappy about the cost and asked me to implement a “pay to print” system. I knew that would be unpopular, and I suspected we didn’t really understand the problem, so I asked the administration for a semester to accumulate data so we could make an informed decision.

So we put a program in place so that when people sent a job to the
printer, they had to go to the printer to release the job with their
username/password (this was also important for HIPPA reasons — can’t
leave patient records on the printer tray). This allowed us to see how
much people were printing.

After one year we had some pretty good stats on how much everyone printed. It turned out that about 10% of our users were doing 90% of the printing. I found one user who printed out all their email and put in into three ring binders!! When they got an email that had replies to replies to replies it was literally thousands of pages.

To address the problem, we told people that we were going to start charging $0.01 per page for black and white prints and $0.07 for color. We also gave everyone an
“printing allowance” of $50 a year, and we displayed their balance on the screen
when they released their print jobs. Behind the scenes we knew the math: 90% of our users would never hit that quota and would never be charged,
Our printing dropped by 75%.    It wasn’t that anyone was deprived — no one
ended up having to pay us for more printing — but because we assigned a
value to something that was previously free — people treated it like a
precious resource.

The other critical lesson was that