Comment by mrtksn
10 months ago
Never ever give away anything for free if you intend to support it is an evergreen advice.
Selling ads? Using it as a gateway to a commercial product? Selling support? Have some genius business plan that allows you to make money in the future? Fine, give it away no strings attached but expecting that users will be grateful is a mistake developers keep repeating. The free users are just as entitled, even more entitled as they don’t have a price tag for your efforts and don’t have a document specifying what are your obligations so they can assume scope of entitlements anyway they wish.
Since you gave it for free, you can’t refund an unhappy customers to make it go away. If it looks like a product, You will be stuck with people who think they did their part by using your products and you failed them. Some may make it a full time job to take a revenge on this injustice.
I’m not even sure that these users are at fault, you actually took something in exchange(like fame, street cred etc) and you are not delivering your part.
Paying users can be incredibly entitled, sometimes even more than people who don’t pay you a dime. The problem is the moment you accept a cent people expect you to do work for them, regardless of whether the money is actually “worth” how much effort needs to go into a feature. The open source projects I’ve worked on get donations but sometimes people will put up like $10 for their pet feature which takes a week to write. Like, thanks for your contribution, but this actually doesn’t affect my priorities at all.
You refund them and it’s solved. You don’t have that option with free users.
why not? just tell them "if you don't like it, you can get a refund" (aka fuck off)
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