There’s a peculiar anxiety that grips people when they consider charging money for information. They worry it seems greedy, or that information “wants to be free,” or that they’re somehow morally obligated to give away everything they’ve learned. This guilt is misplaced.
If you’ve spent years developing expertise, if you’ve made costly mistakes and extracted hard-won lessons, if you’ve synthesized disparate knowledge into something genuinely useful, you’ve created something valuable. And valuable things command prices. This isn’t exploitation; it’s economics.The assumption that information should be free rests on a fundamental confusion between information that exists and information that’s been refined into usefulness. Yes, the raw facts about marketing or programming or pottery might be scattered across the internet. But facts aren’t the same as understanding. Knowing that “content marketing works” is different from knowing exactly how to implement a content strategy that will work for a specific business in a specific market. One is trivia; the other is expertise.
When you charge for your knowledge, you’re not charging for the underlying facts. You’re charging for the curation, the organization, the context, and the wisdom to know what matters and what doesn’t. You’re charging for the years you spent learning what most people will never bother to learn. You’re charging for compression: taking what might require someone else hundreds of hours to figure out and delivering it in a format they can absorb in a fraction of that time.
The people who insist information should be free are often the same people who’ve never created anything valuable themselves, or who undervalue their own expertise so thoroughly that they can’t imagine anyone else’s being worth money. They confuse access with value. Just because something can be copied at zero marginal cost doesn’t mean it has zero value. A digital course can be replicated infinitely, but the knowledge it contains took finite, expensive time to acquire.
There’s also something honest about charging what you think your information is worth. It forces you to be clear about the value you’re providing. If you can’t articulate why someone should pay you for what you know, maybe you haven’t thought carefully enough about what you’re offering. The act of pricing becomes an act of clarification. What transformation are you promising? What problem are you solving? What does someone gain by learning from you instead of stumbling through the same mistakes you made?
Free information has its place. Writing blog posts, answering questions, sharing insights on social media—these create goodwill and demonstrate expertise. But there’s a crucial difference between generous sharing and giving away everything you know. You can be helpful without being a charity. You can contribute to the commons without impoverishing yourself.When you charge appropriately for valuable information, you’re also filtering your audience. The people who pay attention to free content often aren’t the people who will actually implement what they learn. Payment creates commitment. Someone who’s invested money in learning from you is more likely to take the material seriously, to actually do the work, to get results. In this way, charging fair prices isn’t just good for you; it’s good for the people you’re trying to help.
The fear of charging “too much” often stems from imposter syndrome rather than economic reality. You imagine that because something seems easy to you now, it can’t possibly be worth much to others. But that ease is precisely what makes your expertise valuable. What’s effortless for you after years of practice remains difficult for everyone else. They’re not paying for your time; they’re paying for your accumulated experience.Of course, there are ethical boundaries. Charging for information becomes exploitative when you’re preying on desperation, making false promises, or deliberately obscuring simple truths to make them seem more complex than they are. But these are questions of honesty, not pricing. You can charge premium prices while being completely ethical, as long as you’re clear about what you’re offering and you actually deliver value.
The market will tell you if you’ve priced things incorrectly. If no one buys, perhaps you’ve overestimated the value or failed to communicate it effectively. If you’re overwhelmed with buyers, perhaps you’ve underpriced. But these are signals to calibrate, not reasons to feel guilty.
Ultimately, charging what you deem fair for valuable information is a form of self-respect. It’s an acknowledgment that your time, your experience, and your insights matter. It’s a recognition that learning has costs and teaching has value. It’s a rejection of the idea that expertise should be a hobby you pursue at your own expense while “real” work happens elsewhere.
If what you know can save someone time, help them avoid expensive mistakes, or enable them to achieve something they couldn’t achieve alone, that has monetary value. Price it accordingly. The people who need what you’re offering will pay. The people who don’t see the value weren’t your customers anyway.