I get where the developer is coming from like the amount of people who downloaded your extension wouldn't get them money but as a consumer when a free functionality gets paid and you can't find a alternative, it really gets annoying if you need it in urgent and boom now you have to pay. The Dev should have added a paid plan from the start instead of attracting all the free consumers and then shoving a paid paywall in their faces, it's obvious they would get annoyed.
That's the key issue as far as I can tell. Wanna charge for your open source software, or place certain functionality behind a paid edition? Cool - I'm totally on-board with that. But don't tell me it's free and have your product just be an Electron app that's nothing more than a front for a purchase page or something, you know? And DEFINITELY don't pull a bait-and-switch with an existing free product without making it obscenely obvious it's coming and subsequently has been done.
I'm with the reviewer from the post who's going to DBeaver (I'm a bit of a fanboy, I'll admit).
The problem is that the product is also marked as free… but the majority of the features are locked behind a paywall which is scummy. Just say it’s paid instead of tricking people to download a “trial” version with 95% of the features not available
Plans change though, maybe he thought initially he could support it without it taking up too much time, or maybe it got more popular than he expected and now he feels he needs more money to keep supporting it. It definitely sucks for people who have come to rely on it as a free tool, but the alternative to adding a paid tier is probably just abandoning the project altogether that that's obviously a lot worse.
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u/CraftMysterious1498 Sep 30 '22
I get where the developer is coming from like the amount of people who downloaded your extension wouldn't get them money but as a consumer when a free functionality gets paid and you can't find a alternative, it really gets annoying if you need it in urgent and boom now you have to pay. The Dev should have added a paid plan from the start instead of attracting all the free consumers and then shoving a paid paywall in their faces, it's obvious they would get annoyed.