Too cheap to meter

Too cheap to meter describes a commodity so inexpensive that it is cheaper and less bureaucratic to simply provide it for a flat fee or even free and make a profit from associated services. It can also refer to services which it would cost more to itemize bills for the service than it costs to provide the service in the first place, thus it being simpler and less expensive to just provide it in a bundle along with other services.

Although sometimes attributed to Walter Marshall, a pioneer of nuclear power in the United Kingdom, the phrase was coined by Lewis Strauss, then Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, who in a 1954 speech to the National Association of Science Writers said:

"Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter... It is not too much to expect that our children will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age."

It is often assumed that Strauss' prediction was a reference to conventional uranium fission nuclear reactors. Indeed, only ten days prior to his “Too Cheap To Meter” speech, Strauss was present for the groundbreaking of the Shippingport Atomic Power Station where he predicted that, "industry would have electrical power from atomic furnaces in five to fifteen years." However, Strauss was possibly referring to hydrogen fusion power and Project Sherwood, which was conducting secret research on developing practical fusion power plants.

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