The NFTs world is no news to everyone who has some knowledge about the crypto-verse. Just like other crypto assets the NFT holds its value amongst others too. It gets more valued when they are just a little amount in circulation. Not everyone would have access to get one.
The feelings after purchasing an NFT are most time similar to its secondary market price, in as much as there is profit. Another side of the crypto market is the negative feelings of a buyer when they buy at the initial sale price or the secondary market, then the floor price drops below that price level. Owning an NFT comes either way.
What is Free Mint?
Free mint is a concept executed in the digital currency world in which users from different blockchains get to mint an NFT and have to pay the price of the transaction only. The creator of the NFT gets no profit from this, just done for the sake of others. One way by which the creator gets to take advantage of this is when they get to mint with everyone else or they get to have some collections of these NFTs in reserve for themselves. But minting with everyone's a little fair than just having a load of them in reserve.
This free mint system could be related to how Satoshi launched Bitcoin because he got to mine his Bitcoin with everyone else.
To think of Satoshi having a bulk amount of the Bitcoin In reserve then BTC might not have gotten the stability it has to date because there is going be some power behind the walls.
Free mint projects and ordinals most times have the highest floor prices and this is strongly in resonance with crypto users. The Bitcoin Frogs was an art collection launched on BTC where users have to mint via the lightning network and pay for the transaction fee alone. Based on recent updates, the NFT collection now has a floor price of 0.038 BTC assuming it had a lesser transaction fee then it would give a 1000 times return in a few months.
Airdropping is another method of executing free mint for a certain purpose and then actions are taken thereafter. This is way better and fair compared to the free mint approach since those who are executing the airdrop know the conditions beforehand. Pixel Pepes were airdropped to all Ordinals wallet users who made transactions before BTC blocks 777888. Or the Uniswap airdrop and the Solana chain airdropped their tokens and some other blockchains with their NFTs to stabilize and provide liquidity.
The free-cost basis NFTs render a risk to the creators for earning no revenue for their products in exchange for organic community adoption that could potentially establish high floor prices.
The community created becomes the marketplace instead of creators having to do so themselves. It would be so painful if no users get to mint because the time and sacrifice spent on minting would be wasted. But at least the creator gets to receive quick feedback before putting a lot more effort into a failed project.
For example, Assets on BTC and ETH were also free, minting of fungible tokens, digital items, and metaverse respectively. Assets could be worth much more than their transaction fee cost for the magnitude ranging from 10x to 1,000x.
Conclusion
The so-called free mint might not be so free, it depends on the time and day in particular. The fee markets are programmed into BTC and ETH, if a collection is needed and there is some sort of congestion that day for some reason, the fee could spike during the mint thereby making the minting price so unfair and turning it into an auction.