Observing how FOSS advocates actually behave, and mind that the rest of the world isn't crazy like them:

>Good software that you use every day isn’t worth less than a cup of coffee for you?

No.

>Should this student just do this for free?

Yes.

>$2/mo is perfectly reasonable.

No.

Glad to see you're the type of person that enjoys working entirely for free!

I'm not against software subscriptions, but $2/mo is pretty expensive for an alternative to an app that already comes on your phone.

A $2/mo subscription is extremely expensive for something that you're going to keep using; the present value is somewhere in the $500-800 range. That's over 20x more expensive than the $25 lifetime purchase, and 3-5x the cost of a lifetime purchase of Microsoft Office Home. You would basically pay for the lifetime license after 1 year.

$25 for lifetime is maybe a little expensive for what it is, but whatever. But it seems to me that people have a similar if not worse blind spot with subscriptions as they do with credit card debt. The pricing for subscriptions is always off the charts when you compare present value to the cost of a one-time purchase.

Most devs nowadays don’t even offer you that option, so kudos for that alone