Oracle is famous for this, and it basically amounts to anything you want to do leads you to another sales rep with an upsell -- everything useful becomes feature-gated.

It might work better with consumers, where such a strategy isn't cost-effective, but I also imagine its a difficult system to tech support -- you get a combinatorial explosion of possible "features" that may be in play. Anyways, it incentivizes bad behavior even consumer side, encouraging results like 200 $1 features and communities/tutorials/discussion becomes strangled