If You Get it for Free, Don't Holler When it BreaksIf You Get it for Free, Don't Holler When it Breaks

On Thursday, a software error sent online telephony service from Skype to the sidelines, where it remains, silent and broken, but apparently healing.As of this morning, a message on Skype's home page read: "Skype is stabilizing, but this process may continue throughout the day."

Small businesses that rely on Skype for phone service may be fuming, but should calm down and remember what they paid for it. If you haven't heard, the service is mostly free, with paid features like voicemail for $20 a year.

If you're running a business on free or mostly free services, understand that free never means free. There is always a cost involved. In this case, the real cost of Skype is the uncertainty of having phone service when you want or need it, and the downtime when service is out. To be fair, Skype has heretofore been reliable, and never had an outage of this magnitude.

In other words, quit being sore. You get what you pay for.