Razor and Blades

Gillette practically gives away the handle, then sells you blades for the rest of your life. King Gillette invented the safety razor in 1901 and the model that came with it: sell the hardware cheap, sometimes at a loss, and profit on the proprietary refills that only fit it. The pattern spread everywhere. Inkjet printers ship at or below cost while the ink prints money at luxury-goods margins. Nespresso pods, priced per ounce, creep toward the cost of fine wine. The lock-in is the entire point: once you own the handle, walking away means throwing it out and starting over.

For founders and operators, this model looks like a license to print recurring revenue until someone figures out how to sell a compatible refill. Dollar Shave Club undercut Gillette on generic blades, grew fast, and sold to Unilever for around $1 billion. Right-to-repair movements and third-party cartridges have chewed at printer margins for years. The strength of the entire model rests on exactly one thing, and there is also an inverse version of it that runs the opposite direction. Which one you are actually running, and what protects the consumable, is what the app holds back.