Since my priorities were different than the original buyer, I repaid that discount amount.
Maybe one day they'll turn it into an yearly thing to avoid ads.
I respect that they offered the option at purchase time and then at any point after, and at a reasonable price.
And isn't this an option that the everything-is-a-market HN libertarians would like to have: People who want less expensive, say, TVs, can get the existing market price for that. And people who don't like that ads/surveillance, but want the nice economies-of-scale hardware, can pay what the brand would've made on advertising and surveillance, to opt-out, for that unit?
Ideally, a lot of the current surveillance and advertising (implemented almost entirely by HN's own field) would be outlawed, but paid opt-out can sometimes be a reasonable pragmatic individual compromise, for now.
Or maybe I'm wrong - did the $X you paid for ads-free also give you root access?
Which I bought for pragmatic business reasons.
Don't worry, I have a home full of Debian, OpenWrt, Coreboot, a non-'smart' TV, GrapheneOS, etc.
There are no IoT devices, and I go out of my way to avoid buying devices with IoT shoved in. For reasons obvious to people who know how they work, and who know what their business priorities and track records are.
Also, in startups, I usually use open source, avoid unwarranted vendor lock-in and certain known-jerk companies, and try to work with people who are similarly-minded about such practices (it's a useful signal of better-than-average people who care, IME).