This is why on principle I almost 99.99% refuse to invest time or money in any app or service that is an ongoing cost that can be taken away or enshittified.
It needs to not collect data, have a single purchase (or yearly feature update subscriptions that don’t affect the underlying functionality that is permanently available to me as a user) and if there’s any doubt about that I’m looking for the next, more permanent solution + negative review for enshittifiers
KDE Plasma recently added a once-annually notification requesting donations to the KDE e.V. (who pay for things like server infrastructure to support the project). Is this past your line, or acceptable?
I can handle that.
- its a donation
- its a presumably good product I want to continue to be funded and developed
- once a year
What if it weren’t a donation? What if the situation were a once annual subscription where your use of the software is reliant on that subscription cost?
Yes, I realize KDE is still open source, but what if they did this anyways?
Then thats a no. I’m not getting anything embedded in my workflow that can randomly decide it can’t work because the mother-ship is down or the business model needs to change.
Edit: all software business models in general need to embrace this. Charge more if ya have to or provide the essential features initially and then use nice-to-haves as the gain-winners going forward. Thats really how it should be with everything
Ideally speaking: totally not cool
Realistically speaking: they got solid stuff going, and plus you can disable it one way or another
Idealistically and realistically: Totally and absolutely cool. If anything, they have a moral imperative to keep the project going, since there are users that depend on it, and doing that requires money. As such, people will need to be informed of how to contribute, so a pop up doing just that is a good way to achieve this. Why would this not be ok, even idealistically?
If it is not open source, and you are not paying, someone else is and you are the product.
Bonus: You could be paying and be the product anyway.
See: Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc etc
This is a great post. Additionally, if the exploitation isn’t occurring in a ramp up of costs to use basic functions of the service, it’s definitely occurring somewhere else and likely at the expense of your privacy.
There was an iOS app I used like this that did a great job of scanning text books.
After I used it for about 6 months this exact thing happened. Started charging fees for many different things.
Exporting images as pdf had a charge, then scanning to make the text searchable had a fee.
I just exported as jpg and used imagic and ocrmypdf to take care of this.
Then I learned that iOS has a built in scanner in the files app, so I just switched to that one.
Yep, one free and one paid app I have used for a while recently moved previously entitled functionality behind subscription paywalls. Serves me right. Will stick to libre apps from here and suffer that way instead.
The app was really good and I’d be willing to pay for it, but not a subscription just to use features that are already in the app.
Additionally, it’s a scanner app, who scans enough to subscribe to a scanner app but doesn’t scan enough to not just buy a scanner?
I was able to talk my org into leaving Meetup for the same reasons. It’s just progressively getting worse, advertising to our users while simultaneously raising fees. Removing the ability to sync calendars. They also won’t give us the email addresses of any of our users unless we upgrade to “pro” (for an additional fee, of course), and even then, only the ones who RSVP to our events.
Raising fees is one thing, but doing so while removing features and adding just blatant irrelevant advertisements aint gonna work for me.
Couldn’t be arsed to read this, fed the link into an LMM and asked to summarize. This is the result:
Dave Lane’s blog post, “Why ‘free’ proprietary software will always end in tears,” discusses the pitfalls of using proprietary software that is offered for free. He shares a personal story about a scouting group’s experience with a poorly implemented proprietary system and explains how such software often becomes a critical dependency for organizations. This dependency can lead to issues when the software’s limitations or costs become apparent. Lane argues that proprietary software, even when free, often leads to negative outcomes due to its restrictive nature and the control exerted by its developers
This is bad. Lane’s argument is that freemium software is tore up from the floor up. You’d get the impression reading this summery that he was just bitching about one program his Boy Scout troop used.
And now they truly don’t need to read it because you corrected it, in the end they won!
Maybe not everyone sees the world as win/lose, black/white, 1/0… weird concept, i know…
Ok then, “in the end they didn’t learn anything”
summery
That’s bright and sunny.
Which is why LLMs require a pretty hefty grain of salt.
LLM completely whiffed on this one:
- It’s not a poorly implemented app. It’s a well-implemented app that in the early stages is not monetized
- The issue is not that limitations and costs are becoming apparent. The issue is that after the honeymoon period ends, developers seeking return on investment start locking features critical for business behind a paywall, and charge a very high premium fee for services that used to be free.
- It’s not the restrictive nature of freemium software that becomes the issue. It’s the increasing enshittification of platforms to squeeze business customers for as much as they can before the platform collapses, betting on the established dependency making it too costly to switch to another platform.
IT’S A TRAP!
Here’s a 1-word explanation: enshittification. AKA The “loss leader” approach.
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The most important point of venture capital isn’t even mentioned.
