HX, FREE? What’s the Catch? (There Isn’t One!)
Why we built HX to be free, why that matters, and why real value should be accessible to everyone.
When did being part of a community become another monthly bill?
£10 here, £25 there, £50 for another membership, another subscription, another platform promising to help you grow your business. Before you know it, you’re spending hundreds of pounds every month just for the opportunity to connect with people, promote your business and hopefully find new customers. And that’s before you’ve made a single sale!
As small business owners ourselves, we’ve been there. We know what it’s like to look at all those subscriptions, memberships, website fees, event platforms, networking costs and endless software tools, wondering when it all became so expensive simply to do business. Each one might seem like a small amount, but put them together over a year and the numbers can be frightening, especially when you’re just starting out or trying to keep your business growing.
At some point, we started asking ourselves a different question. What if we stopped charging people for the opportunity to succeed and started creating opportunities for everyone to succeed together?
That’s one of the reasons we created HX, Hive eXperience. We wanted to build something genuinely different, a place where people, businesses, charities and organisations could connect, collaborate and grow without having to reach for their credit cards before they’d even walked through the door.
But surely, there’s a catch?
We had a rather amusing moment recently when Andy asked Google’s Gemini about HX. Gemini correctly explained that joining HX as a member was free, but then suggested that launching your own community must involve commercial onboarding, hosting fees and privately negotiated arrangements.
We had to smile. Even AI couldn’t quite believe that we’d made the whole thing free!
And perhaps that says something about the world we’ve created. We’ve become so accustomed to the idea that anything valuable must come with a price tag, a monthly subscription, a premium upgrade or some hidden cost waiting around the corner. When someone tells us something is free, our immediate reaction is often suspicion rather than excitement.
But here’s the thing. On HX, you can create your own Hive, bring your community together, build your business presence and start connecting without paying a monthly subscription or platform hosting fee. You can create a professional business website, organise events, share knowledge, build relationships and explore opportunities, all without paying simply to have access to the platform.
Yes, really! And that’s not an introductory offer or a marketing trick. It’s how we designed HX to work.
Free doesn’t mean there’s no value
There’s an interesting perception around the word free. Somehow, we have started associating price with value, assuming that if something costs more, it must be better, and if something is free, it probably isn’t worth very much.
But is that really true? Does a community become more valuable because we charge people to join it? Does a small business suddenly become more professional because it spends thousands of pounds on a website? Does a charity create more impact because it pays a fortune for the technology that connects its volunteers?
We don’t think so. In fact, we believe some of the most valuable things in life, friendship, support, belonging, trust and human connection, are things you simply cannot put a price on.
Imagine being an entrepreneur with a brilliant idea but very little money to get started. With HX, you can create your business presence, build a website, showcase your products or services and start connecting with potential customers without another monthly bill hanging over your head. Imagine being a charity that can bring volunteers, supporters and beneficiaries together in one space, or an association that can keep members connected and engaged between events without adding another expensive piece of technology to its budget.
And imagine being someone who simply wants to find their people, to discover a community where they feel welcome, valued and part of something meaningful.
That’s the value we want to create, and we don’t believe people should have to pay for the opportunity to access it.
So how does HX make money?
Now, this is where people usually raise an eyebrow, because of course HX is a business. We’ve invested an enormous amount of time, energy, creativity and resources into building it, and we want it to grow into a successful, sustainable platform that continues to evolve and create opportunities for everyone involved.
But we wanted to approach the business model differently. Rather than charging people every month for the privilege of being on our platform, we decided to connect our success directly to the success of the people using it.
When you prosper, we prosper. It’s as simple as that.
Creating an account is free, creating a Hive is free, and creating your own business website is free. There are no compulsory monthly platform subscriptions or Hive hosting fees. When you make a sale through HX, whether that’s an event ticket, a course, a product or a service, HX receives a 5% platform commission on that transaction, with any applicable payment processing charges handled separately.
Individual Hive owners can also choose to offer paid memberships, courses, events or other services within their communities. That’s entirely their decision, because we want people to be able to create value and earn from their expertise, knowledge and creativity.
If you’re simply building relationships, sharing ideas, supporting other members or bringing your community together, HX doesn’t charge you for doing so. We don’t need everyone to pay us every month just to keep the lights on in their own little corner of our village.
For us, this model makes perfect sense. We want to earn our success by helping others create theirs, rather than charging people before they’ve had the opportunity to achieve anything.
What if prosperity wasn’t a competition?
Somewhere along the way, we’ve created a business culture where everyone seems to be competing for a slice of the same pie. More members, more followers, more clicks, more subscriptions, more attention. We’re constantly being encouraged to protect our little corner of the market, compete for visibility and find new ways to monetise every interaction.
But what if we could make the pie bigger together?
What if a local business could grow because its community genuinely supported it? What if an expert could share knowledge, build relationships and earn from their experience without needing five different platforms and a collection of expensive subscriptions? What if charities, associations, entrepreneurs and businesses could come together to collaborate, share resources and create opportunities that wouldn’t have existed otherwise?
That’s the world we want to help create through HX, a world where connection leads to collaboration, and collaboration creates commerce, with real human relationships at the heart of everything.
We call it our Village Without Walls, a place where people can belong, contribute their talents, share opportunities and prosper together, regardless of where they live or how much money they have to spend.
And because we believe the experience of belonging should be built around people rather than advertising revenue, HX is also ad-free and algorithm-free. We don’t want your attention to be the product we’re selling. We want the relationships, opportunities and communities you create to be the real measure of our success.
Free is not our marketing trick. It’s our philosophy.
Of course, we’re ambitious for HX. We want it to reach people around the world, help thousands of small businesses thrive, support charities and associations, create opportunities for experts and entrepreneurs, and bring communities together in ways that genuinely make a difference.
And yes, we want to build a commercially successful business along the way, because success will allow us to keep investing in the technology, improving the experience and bringing even more value to our members.
But we fundamentally believe that a business can be commercially successful while making it easier for other people to succeed too. We don’t have to charge everyone at the door to create something valuable inside. We can open the doors, welcome people in, encourage them to share their talents, connect with one another and create opportunities, knowing that when commerce happens, we all benefit.
Perhaps that’s a different way of thinking about growth, and perhaps that’s why even AI struggles to believe it! But sometimes, creating something better starts with challenging the way things have always been done.
We created HX because we were tired of seeing more and more barriers being placed between people and opportunities. We wanted to build something that made connection easier, collaboration more natural and prosperity more accessible.
And we genuinely believe that when we help others grow, we create a better world for everyone.
So yes, HX is FREE. And there’s a very good reason why.
Not because it has little value, but because we believe the value it creates should be accessible to everyone. Not because we’re giving something away with nothing in return, but because we believe in building a business where success is shared. And certainly not because we’ve forgotten to add a pricing page, as Gemini might have suggested!
Free is our choice. Belonging is our purpose. Shared prosperity is our business model.
We don’t want to build another platform that prospers simply because people keep paying to be there. We want to build a thriving community where people choose to be because they feel connected, supported and inspired, where businesses grow, ideas flourish and opportunities are created through genuine collaboration.
Because the future we’d love to see isn’t one where a few platforms prosper from everyone else. It’s one where we prosper because others prosper.
And that, for us, is what HX is all about.
Belong. Contribute. Prosper.
Come and discover what we’re building, create your free account, explore the communities or start your very own Hive. We’d love to welcome you into our Village Without Walls.