$12.5 Million for the Code That Runs the World: Real Investment or Cheap Marketing?

Before Pago Fácil existed, there was code. For years I built and published free software. It was an online payments plugin — anyone could download it, install it, and start accepting payments on the internet. No cost, no license, no strings attached. I did it because that's how I learned: by building things and putting them out into the world. In five years, that plugin reached 3,000 active businesses in Chile. Three thousand companies processing payments with my code. And in all that time, exactly one person ever sent me anything: five dollars "for a beer." That was it. That code didn't become Pago Fácil (a Chilean fintech I founded) directly. What it did was something more important: it made me see that 3,000 businesses depended on that service to collect payments online, and nobody was charging for it seriously. The insight wasn't "let me monetize the plugin" — it was "this problem is worth a company." That reading led to Pago Fácil, which we eventually sold for over twenty million