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Realistically for them, coding harnesses are an extremely competitive landscape, and they have to live in constant fear that Anthropic/OpenAI etc will rugpull them and force these harnesses to go through API billing (effectively killing it as an option for I would guess the majority of their users). That nearly happened earlier this year when Anthropic intimated they were going to do this.

The other reality is, there are now good free alternatives to Conductor (I haven't tried them so we will see) - it does suck if you feel very tied to your existing workflow, but I also think about it from the level of 'these people gave me something for free that helped me a lot, and I want things to work out well for them'.

Are you asking people why they like money? like, a lot of money?

Why do you think they sell out? What is it about the deal that you aren’t happy about?

Users chose them knowing full well the risks.

Build a product with paid customers, then you can choose not to sell out.

Users did not know full well the risks. You never do.

And thanks for the projection. I have a product with paid customers and I refuse to sell out. The project sinks with me.