There is no such thing as free.
Time money and reputation are the denominations for most resources. Time is putting your energy into solving a problem or creating an opportunity. Money is cash or financial risk (e.g., floating with credit) to apply to creation. Reputation is leveraging one's network to ask a favor.
Nothing in this world is free, but there are many opportunities to improve the return on investment. The most critical first step toward enhancing returns is knowing what you want to accomplish. I have found that most people looking to stay "lean" in fact spend their time wantonly. I have written about this problem of valuing one's time elsewhere.
Out-of-pocket expense - "cash" - is often the cheapest way to proceed. The two keys are managing the budget and knowing what you want to do. For managing the outlay, I like to use Pay by Privacy.com for setting a budget and getting alerts whenever spend occurs against that budget. It's a super-helpful tool when applied to a discipline like Profit First.
Even with experience, I keep getting surprised at how much one can get for a small outlay. I once ran an experiment with a developer working for me on a virtual reality project. I gave him the challenge of spending $100 on the Unity Asset Store to accelerate the project. He had a hard time getting close to the $100 - there was so much available for so little money! He built his prototype much more quickly - the same day, in fact - with assets he bought instead of trying to create them himself.
He would have enjoyed learning how to create those assets - and that is the time fallacy. Thinking this is "fun work" is a flashing yellow light. For an entrepreneur, fun is accomplishing your goals. Your time is the most scarce resource: you never get it back.
In my work with technical people, I see the cash-time tradeoff in open-source software. I love the whole open-source movement. It has fostered an acceleration in technical mastery and invention just in this millennium. It created the idea that you can stack your insight on "free" software. But the trade is that you have to manage the stack the "free" software requires. For example, Express is free, but it requires running node.js, which requires Linux, which needs a compute resource, such as a Digital Ocean droplet. So congratulations, you are using that free tool, but more of your time goes to managing all these other pieces of the puzzle. That most of them are zero-outlay does not make them zero-cost: you are spending time on it.
In contrast, using a higher-level platform such as functions-as-a-service lets one constrain the time investment to just the functionality that drives value for you and eliminate the ongoing time commitment to maintain more of the stack. The price is in paying for that platform.
And once you accept that, you can trade up further. Do you even need code? Is this something a no-code tool could let you or someone else do for even less time investment? The bit of money it costs may be an excellent trade against one's time.
One of the great things about spending money is how trackable it is. The fact that the costs keep staring you in the face makes you take the investment seriously and look at how it drives value. Accounting is for one's time is much harder, especially when one is tired and undisciplined. So if the costs were equal, I would break the tie in favor of spending money if only because of accountability. This choice yields better management and faster learning.
This discussion has focused primarily on time and money, but there is a third denomination: reputation. The network of people who think well of you is a powerful resource. Asking for favors from others can generate tremendous value. Expect that this means you give back - and that is all a good thing! Social capital is as real as your financial capital and your waking hours. Use it to your advantage. Favor can come in actual development, advice, amplification, referrals - or even becoming customers and investors!
Of these three, leveraging money and time to build a reputation can be an excellent investment. For example, the application of time to do a good deed can build social capital. My favorite theory of "X in public" is that you create the opportunity for someone else to gain without having to experience your hard knocks by doing whatever you are doing in the open. X could be to build, learn, work - and potentially other verbs. But the idea is to do well for others. Some of this can come from "exhaust media." Record yourself in the activity using Twitch or the like. Cut down to videos and transcripts, and share it! Relatively low cost. Other techniques are higher impact and more intentional, like writing daily essays.
Nothing is free. But most need not be expensive.
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash