Give nothing, expect nothing: Gitlab latest punching bag for entitled users
Yeah yeah, everyone is entitled and we should think of those brave corporations who need to make money.<p>Seriously?<p>Look, when you give something away for free, you’re either a charity or you’re marketing your non-free tier products and using your large user base to drive premium users.<p>If a company has committed too much to their free tier and it is not sustainably driving premium users, I have little sympathy for them.<p>You did a marketing thing.<p>It didn’t work.<p>Sucks to be you. You are still not getting my business. I do not feel sorry for you when people lash you on Twitter and promise to leave.<p>There’s no reason to feel sorry for companys in this situation; it is a situation of their own engineering.<p>If you don’t like the product, don’t use it.<p>If enough people don’t use it, the conversion funnel will dry up and the company will change tunes (again).<p>The only thing to take note of here is, yes: if you’re not paying for it, you are the product. Feel free to grumble about it and call out these companies, but don’t be <i>surprised</i> about it.<p>&gt; The common thread here: Lots of users expect to get things for free, forever, from for-profit companies that don’t answer to them. Those users contribute almost nothing1 to the bottom line for the for-profit companies, and actively drive up costs for them.<p>Please, spare me.<p>Those users are part of the conversion funnel to paid tier users.<p>Gitlab would not exist without them.<p>If they piss them all off and they leave, it will contribute, I’d wager, significantly the total evaporation of their bottom line.