I do get that there might be a question as to how you could get additional developers under the old license...
If you choose to not buy a commercial license, your commercial project in this case will have to be under the AGPL, and you can sell your products, but you also have to promise your users that you will provide a copy of the source on request. I think we both understand the demands of the AGPL, and it's not readily compatible with a closed source model. But you took the example of "what if the company changes the license" -- and if you were already doing a closed source project, that would mean you were not dealing with the AGPL, but the commercial license. So again, I ask, how would the BSD protect you from that risk? Upstream is still free to change the license of future releases...?
The problem isn't paying 400 USD/year. This is negligible cost compared to how much it costs to hire a developer. The problem is that software created in such a way wouldn't be widely used for reasons mentioned in one of my other comments.