Comment by lo_zamoyski
3 years ago
> I see it as a way of getting paid for the development of services.
The obvious reason is that a company has an incentive to make it easy to onboard and no incentive to help you migrate off or even an incentive to make it difficult or costly to leave. I don't see how making import/export something only a payed tier has is specifically or especially for funding development. It's not the deal breaker or the reason people choose Protonmail over others, even if it can be a consideration.
Do you not agree that the types of support requests or other feedback from the masses in the free tier tends to be of a much lower quality than you might get from a paid user? The expense of supporting those requests are not insignificant. By ensuring that the product is in a much more stable state before reaching the free tier can help keep those support costs lower.
>It's not the deal breaker or the reason people choose Protonmail over others, even if it can be a consideration.
Yet here we are on a dev centric forum talking about it being a "bad" decision. From a dev perspective, the decision of starting something in a paid tier then (if ever) releasing to the free tier is not offensive to me. A company offers a free thing that has fewer features than a paid tier, "news at 11" type of story it is not. Doing poor research into the limitations of the free tier and complaining publicly about not having access to the paid features on the free tier is also not news worthy. Again, yet, here we are.