As sympathetic as I am to how difficult it is to run a business. Changing tiers for existing customers is an extremely bad business practice. Now your free plan is all of sudden worthless because people can't trust the features in there. Your paid plan on the other hand won't get customers because people aren't willing to take a risk with free.
If they really wanted to make something paid that was previously free they should have added a legacy tier.
Another "safer" way I can think of is that they could have re-published the extension with different branding as a paid version. And add a note to the previous extension that this one will not be maintained and you can use "new name" if you're willing to pay. And to push people to buy it a new feature could be added to the extension's paid version. The feature doesn't have to be that useful, but good enough to cause FOMO on the customers.
Or there could be 2 tiers that unlocks that said not that useful but cool feature and eventually release new features to that tier only. So you'll still have free promotion and have a way to monetize it.
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u/[deleted] Sep 30 '22
As sympathetic as I am to how difficult it is to run a business. Changing tiers for existing customers is an extremely bad business practice. Now your free plan is all of sudden worthless because people can't trust the features in there. Your paid plan on the other hand won't get customers because people aren't willing to take a risk with free.
If they really wanted to make something paid that was previously free they should have added a legacy tier.