In many cases, being frugal lets you find great value. Some examples of cheap things I love:

• Casio F-91W
• Claude Code
• My biking jacket from Kaohsiung Decathlon
• black tea
• Linux
• Quick dry sports towels
• Soy milk
• Tofu
• My house
• Second-hand clothes
• Friendship
• A kit for giving yourself haircuts

Price is determined by many factors, one of which is cost, but that’s not the full picture! There’s also “brand value” (which may or may not mean something to you); scarcity; how hard it is to produce; how hard it is to transport.

But the biggest source of inflated value to avoid is the lock-in effect. Apple users are the victims of this (no shade!). People like the look and feel of Apple products. But it’s so different from other products, from the OS to the charging cable to the green texts, that they can’t imagine getting another type of phone. Then they’re stuck with iPhones, even when the battery is intentionally reduced over time, and the prices remain sky-high even for old phones.

The lock-in effect doesn’t just apply to consumer products; it also applies to enterprise software. Some enterprise software is great, but also expensive. Slack is a good example – Slack can do a lot of things, so even though it’s somewhat expensive, people still recommend using it. HubSpot is an example on the other side. It seems like a great CRM, and maybe it’s the best, but I think the standards are so low.

Particularly now in the age of vibe-coding, it’s so easy to create your own custom software. I think this makes a lot of sense. In many cases, it takes just as much work to customize enterprise software as it would to make your own tool (there are people that dedicate their entire careers to helping people use bloated software like Salesforce, HubSpot, and the like!).

Granted, it’s hard to revolutionize a business that’s already running on one of those archaic pieces of junk. But I think that companies that can start afresh or make the transition to AI-first operations will soon outperform all competitors. And that goes for social movements like Sapiens First, too!