Don't ever rely on your own perception of what's intuitive to evaluate a user experience. Someone has given specific feedback to the contrary, which means that there will be others. If I was the site's maintainer, I'd be heading straight for the analytics to see if they support this feedback.

The contributions actually increased. Which is why they kept it.

>Don't ever rely on your own perception of what's intuitive to evaluate a user experience

Really great line, i liked that a lot.

This part wasn't that horrible as the quote from Elementary blog was (apparently they removed the old blogpost, but it's easily googlable):

"We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software. We didn’t exclude a $0 button to deceive you; we believe our software really is worth something."

This. They tried to shame people for downloading without paying, Foss community shamed them for that because they don't pay anything for the parts they get from Ubuntu, Debian, gnu, Linux etc.

>> we believe our software really is worth something.

That's why you let users decide after they've used the software. You don't tell someone that up front and expect a payment when you haven't been able to try and test the software for yourself and your team.

If it's worthy, then users will come back and offer a payment or contact you to find out how they can contribute if they feel its really worth it.

I think a lot of people have this misconception that everybody who uses open source software just assumes it should be free. In my own experience, it's quite the opposite. Most people who use open source are actually more willing to pay for something they feel is valuable to them without hesitation. They're also usually willing to pay a little more then perhaps is necessary in order to make sure its maintained and supported.

Because for most people, "0 dollars" is not a sensible answer to that question. Getting something for free is perceived as a separate kind of action from purchasing something, even if you can ultimately boil it down to the same "exchange $X for Y" process.

I mean, of course it is; but it's the obvious numeric way to encode the response "fuck you is how much." Like punching in $0 as a tip on a POS reader.

You're right, now that you mention it. It is a sensible answer, but it doesn't mean "I'd just like this for free, thanks."

When principles and reality clash, reality wins. In principle the website should make perfect sense to everyone.

When BetterTouchTool forced the switch to a "pay-as-you" want version (they even forcefully expired existing versions of the app, it simply stopped working unless you fork over money), their minimum was 4$ or so, because apparently if it was less, then the payment processing would be too high in relation.

So apparently in the bait-and-switch mentality of the mac world, that you can pay '0 dollars' is not obvious.

Because it isn't intuitive.