>My question is why?

Why free? Because not everyone is into commercial plans, nor is everyone that gives away plans on the Internet into making money on their hobby. That simple act of building a kayak instead of buying a kayak is one step away from the commercial market and all that it implies. Finding a free plan steps even further away from the commercial market, which can be very rewarding.

>Are the plans prices just to high?

Nope.

>Is your budget so tight that every dollar matters?

Yep.

>Don’t think there is any difference between boat designs?

Of course there is. When I designed and built my Siskiwit kayaks, there was nothing else out there commercially or free that was what I wanted -- and I looked at every plan I could find -- the closest was the Redfish King, but I didn't care for the extreme swede-form look. I wanted something similar to a cross between a NDK Romany and Explorer, so I designed something, built a couple of prototypes and then gave the plans away from free. With the Siskiwit LV, I decided to charge a low fee to keep the number of questions down, because it's a fun hobby for me to draw up boats and more questions equal more work, which would mean that I'd need to approach selling the plans more as a business. The rest of the free drawings on my website are mainly historic designs put into drawings that could be used for cedar strip kayaks -- almost all drawn during one winter as a fun project to keep myself busy until the kayak guiding and instruction season started again.

The large number of kayak plans out there free or commercial says that people do know that there is a huge difference between kayak designs and something about one style might snag someone's attention more than another. For example, I don't really like paddling hard chined kayaks, so even though I've built three hard-chined kayaks, I wouldn't do so again.

> Or something else?

If you or another commercial seller wants to snag my pocket change, you'd have to a) design something that interests me, b) sell me that you can do it better than I can, c) show me it will work for the type of paddling that I do, d) prove that it works better than a similar free plan and e) sell me on your plan.