EDIT: There’s no reply button so I’ll reply here. It’s not about the money. I could easily afford this and gladly would have done so as it’s a damn good app.
It’s about the principle. There’s no way none of
your 30+ employees or your marketing department thought “Hey, this might be unexpected to the people heavily using the premium functions. They’ll likely run out of their 500 credits fast!”
Which means it was a deliberate and conscious decision. You could have easily made a little banner last month saying “Bardeen is moving some functions to a Premium subscription. Don’t worry, you’ll be able to continue using most of our tools for free! See the upcoming changes here: (link).”
Was an amazing tool, turns out it was too good to be true.
Bardeen made the service subscription based out of nowhere without any prior in app notice.
They basically used everyone as beta testers while being "free" to collect feedback and tons of talk + positive feedback about them. That part wouldn't even be much of a problem.
The problem is they rug-pulled their many users by adding this out of nowhere. Basically not giving people the chance to find an alternative if they became dependent on Bardeen. Which forces them to subscribe.
Truly a baffling move for a business with an excellent reputation to stain their reputation and name like this. People would have likely subscribed anyway. You must greatly underestimate the advantage you threw away by doing this. It is worth a 100x times more than a few extra subs.
On top of that it constantly bugs out on various things that worked excellent.
