Something pulled at me last week
On open source, code, and why this one costs $1
There was something in me on Friday I was pulling away from.
I sat with it. Tried to name it. Went out for a walk with the dogs.
By the time I came back, I had deleted the launch campaign. Changed the price. And felt more like myself than I had in weeks.
This is the story of how that happened.
I was a developer before I was a marketer
My whole background before Modern Maker was software. Front-end web developer in Shoreditch. Then Hiscox Insurance. Then a startup that raised £5 million where I was part of the product team and ran a newsletter. Then I built a 12-man agency doing JavaScript-heavy builds for clients — portfolio pieces for Vogue, FIFA 21, a school in Malawi selling footballs as a force for good.
I was what I’d call a lazy developer. I loved the architecture. I loved understanding how systems fit together. The CTO brain, not the keyboard brain. When I finally stopped coding for clients and stepped back into the strategist seat, I felt more like myself. So when I folded the agency in 2023, it wasn’t a failure. I just fell out of love.
But here’s what I took with me from those years: I learned almost everything for free.
FreeCodeCamp in 2016. 180 hours, binged it. Stack Overflow for every question I couldn’t answer alone. GitHub for storing code, forking other people’s work, contributing back. WordPress for building client sites. Open source, all of it. The one time I paid money — 5K for a Ruby on Rails boot camp at Lagon in London - I did it for speed, not because I had to. The knowledge itself was freely available.
The community gave me everything. And we gave back too. At the agency, we pushed code to the Cyprus JavaScript community’s GitHub repositories. We open-sourced our own work. Because that’s what you do when you’ve been given something.
When people hire you, they don’t care about the code
At the agency, I learned something that changed how I sell now.
When we talked tech to non-technical clients - Python, JavaScript, database architecture - we attracted other builders. Curiosity from people who wanted to understand the stack.
But when we showed up, demonstrated what we could do, shared our screen, built something live in front of people... clients came. Without persuasion. They were already solution-aware. The only question was whether they wanted us to build it.
Zero convincing. Only showing the work.
I carried that into Modern Maker eventually, but I took a long detour through copywriting and email campaigns first. Persuasion, deadlines, scarcity, urgency. That stuff works. I still teach it. But something had been shifting in me over the past year — a pull toward demonstration over argument. Show it, don’t sell it. Give someone a plan, then ask if they want help going faster.
That’s the thread that connects both halves of my career.
How the AI Studio came about
Inside Modern Maker, we’d been using custom GPTs for a while. Tools like Iggy the Offer Maker - what used to take me 3 to 7 days of back-and-forth calls with a client, extracting their expertise, reviewing, revising - Iggy does in four or five minutes. Same quality, fraction of the time.
So the question became: do we have a Notion doc here, a Google doc there, ten GPT links scattered in a folder somewhere, or do we build one place that holds all of it?
With Claude Code and my JavaScript background, I started building. An AI Studio. A tabbed interface where all your tools live. Clients log in. They find what they need. They stop consuming and start doing.
I shared what I was building. Coaches and consultants responded. Yes. That’s exactly what I’ve wanted and didn’t know I did.
One company approached me about an equity deal. We were going to run a cohort. I was going to charge $2,000.
And that’s where Friday happened.
The walk with the dogs
I wrote the launch email. Read it back. Something felt wrong.
I couldn’t name it at first. So I grabbed Bron, Coconut and Sansa and went outside.
The thing I kept coming back to was this: I got here for free.
Not free as in someone handed it to me - free as in the community built the tools and put them out there and I showed up and used them and gave back. FreeCodeCamp. GitHub. Stack Overflow. All of it. And now AI has done to code what the internet did to encyclopedias. The value of the knowledge itself is collapsing to zero. What you do with it -the creativity, the taste, the what - that’s where the value lives now.
So why was I charging $2,000 to teach someone how to install an AI studio?
It felt like I’d be doing a disservice. To the people I wanted to help. And to the community that got me here.
I came home. Packaged the whole thing in a couple of hours. And when I messaged the company I’d been working with on the equity deal, they told me the coaching cohort wasn’t really their direction anyway - they wanted to go broader. We were aligned. We were both relieved.
I changed the price to $1.
Why $1
The dollar goes to charity. All of it.
In memory of my grandfather, Kyriacos. Who we called Pappou here in Cyprus.
He survived the 1974 conflict here. Sold cigarettes peer-to-peer on the street. Built a catering company from nothing. Had four sons. Donated a portion of his profits his whole life. When he had enough to eat, he fed others. That’s just who he was.
He was more of a father figure to me than anyone. He passed away with cancer in December 2020. Getting this out without it getting to me is hard.
Every year since, in his name, we feed more people. It started at five. Then fifty. Then a hundred. Last year we fed 300 people in a town here in Cyprus called Paralimni — which roughly translates to near the lake.
This AI Studio thing felt too pure to put a price on. It’s not Modern Maker. Modern Maker is marketing, funnels, email — the thing I wake up every day fired up to teach. This was something else. This was me coming back to the creative side I’d put down years ago. The developer. The musician. The kid who just wanted to build something and make people happy.
So the dollar goes to him.
What happened when I put it live
I made a simple page. Put it out there.
107 people grabbed it in the first 24 hours.
I sat there looking at the Stripe transactions and thought: Pappou would have been so proud.
Because that’s what this is, when the business stuff falls away. It’s pure creation. It’s innocent. It’s art. You get full access to the source code. You can change the colors, add your own logo, add features I haven’t thought of. Just like open source always worked - you take it, you make it yours, you give back if you want to.
May 5th. 6pm Cyprus time. One hour. We build it together.
After the workshop it’ll go on YouTube. Free, forever. If you grab the $1 seat before or after, it always goes to charity.
The value of code is zero now.
The value of what you do with it - that’s infinite.
Come build with me.
Your biggest fan,
Jacob ‘free’ Pegs