No, I'm okay with things not being free, but that needs to be stated upfront.

Consider the “ransom” your notice.

Not really - the market tempts you with free to hook you in. You cannot honestly say that the market has asked for every abusive free product that existed.

Users don’t pay up front.

You don’t get any traction that way.

User behavior is a part of this mess.

It was normal to pay up-front for software until about 10 years ago, just a few years after the 2008 crash where startups decided MRR/ARR was the metric for success

Enter the subscription model, holding your tech hostage for periodic payments and predictable cash flow

It’s not a coincidence that MTX happened in gaming at the same time, post 2008. Before then it was horse armour in oblivion.

Users have always paid upfront for software, until software companies with lots of capital started this non sense. All copies of Microsoft Office were paid upfront. Users are just reacting to what the software industry did.

Indie shareware vendors predate "software companies with lots of capital" by decades. The big fishes seldom innovate anything.

Shareware is not SaaS/subscription-based software. That's the bad part, not "try before you buy".

Not really. There has always been shareware, aka trial demos.

Those were only utilities and games, not your office software.

Fair, but I don't think this negates the overall point, that people actually paid for software, and it was usually a one-time fee (often with the choice to pay again later for upgrades, or continue to use the old version forever). The "try before you buy" and expiring nature of shareware was nearly always known at the time of download, before investing time in using the software.

No, the users definitely play a role here.

Remember how it became a meme to just pirate Adobe software because they were so bloody expensive? Well Adobe wants their earnings, regardless if their desire is justified, so Adobe and the rest of the industry changed gears to a model that greatly inhibits piracy and, at least in theory, reduces the upfront cost a customer has to pay in exchange for a higher cost over time.

Adobe is basically a monopoly and it is well documented that they allowed piracy because it meant that the pirates would become dependent on their tools.

Doesn’t matter how you edited a photo technically, it is still photoshopped.

Yup, same with Microsoft - they won the desktop OS and office productivity markets thanks, in big part, to their tacit approval of individual-level pirating of Windows and Office.

Users do what they think their corporate IT or manager will let them do.

Which, by policy, is often little.

The other part of it is service providers wanting growth from cheap tricks. The mental laziness and expecting to have their cake and eat it too is the same.

At some point there needs to be more than sterns looks to discourage these behaviors.

I met someone once where it later developed that they had begun lying to me from the very beginning.

It ended poorly.

I don't demand anything for free. I'll use it but go ahead and don't offer a service instead, won't bother me at all. User-abuse is not justified by calling usage service-abuse.

@duxup Please don't try to justify this despicable behavior. You're not making the world a better place.

Why does everything has to become paid? The web is large enough that the output delta can be held back by investment rather than pushed by it.

For example the image conversion site can be replaced with instructions how to do it on device.

> We want everything for free and we get what we deserve.

Services I pay for, from already-profitable companies, have added advertising.

Therefore I refuse to acknowledge whatever victim blaming line of thought makes it the users' fault rather than putting it on the provider trying to build/expand profit margin.