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It's one thing to be a free user...quite another to be an entitled free user. This is precisely why I do not offer anything for free. I've been there and done

It's one thing to be a free user...quite another to be an entitled free user. This is precisely why I do not offer anything for free. I've been there and done it back in the iPhone 3 era with a dozen apps. Learned my lesson quickly. Never again. It was a nightmare. If the product isn't good enough for someone to pay for it (that could be direct user-paid or advertiser supported) it should not exist.

asadotzler 1mo ago
If your free tier is marketed as a free tier but really it's just "your first hit is free" like your crack dealer's marketing, then it's a fraud on the user, a scam to get you hooked and paying. I am not an entitled user for thinking a free tier designed to provide half the answer and make me pay for the second half is a scam from an evil corporation and to call that out. Also, it is intended to be supported by ads, so it fits your ideal product description quite well despite being a scam.
- robomartin 1mo ago
  > "your first hit is free" like your crack dealer's marketing Oh, please. Don't use it then. Simple. Sign of entitlement: You get something of value for free, bitch about limitations and make-up bogus reasons to continue using the product without paying. If it is of value, use it and pay for it. If it isn't, do not use it and you have nothing to worry about. You are bitching about having access to untold billions of dollars of infrastructure and a massive amount of work from people who have lives and families FOR FREE. Get a grip dude. I use it for work, extensively, and I gladly pay for the services from a number of AI providers. I would gladly pay double. It's the no-brainer of the century: I can do months of work in weeks or less for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per month. I was talking to someone the other day who shares their Netflix account for four other families. Same thing, although, in this case, it's not entitlement, it's theft. They are both versions of the tragedy of the commons in various ways.
  - ragequittah 1mo ago
    Most of the stuff I use is free and excellent. Linux, Firefox, libreoffice, xcp-ng, bottles, steam, playnite, opnsense, docker, dockhand, immich, freshrss, obsidian, tailscale, calibre, caddy, docker, pi-hole, signal, audiobookshelf I could probably keep going for a long while. I'm very glad most good software creators I've come across do not have your mindset.
    - robomartin 1mo ago
      None of these things are free my friend. They probably represent tens of billions of dollars in development over years, decades in some cases. You are missing the point entirely. Let's just take one: LibreOffice. This was a FOSS project from the very start. It is intended to be used as you use it. Even then, bitching about functionality and features would be entitled. In that case, if you don't like it, stop using it or participate in the development...for free, donating your time. ChatGPT is NOT a free product. Yes, they have a free tier. And that's fantastic. We've all used it. But this is not a FOSS company. Bitching about their free tier isn't right. Again, that's being entitled. Why do they owe you more than they are giving you? They do not. If you want more, pay for it. Or, you could buy a bunch of powerful computers and run an open weights model on your own hardware and have free intelligence to use as much as you want. Oh, wait, that wouldn't be free, would it? You'd have to pay thousands for the hardware. OK, wait, how about you do that and I use your self-hosted LLM's for free and then bitch about the lack of performance. Yup. Entitlement. Always a reason for other people to owe the entitled and never a reason for the entitled to owe them anything. And this goes way beyond what we are talking about here, far and wide. > I'm very glad most good software creators I've come across do not have your mindset. Here's something else you do not understand. FOSS isn't free to create, not even close. Take something like Linux. I would be comfortable estimating that Linux has probably a development cost in the one-hundred billion dollar range. I would not be surprised if was way more than that. The massive number of people who worked on Linux over the decades have lives, families, homes, responsibilities, etc. The only way Linux happened is because they are otherwise employed and donate their time (with is fantastic, I did a lot of of that when I was younger, had time and less responsibilities) or someone is explicitly paying for them to work on Linux because of the benefits they might derive from it. The only "free" part about FOSS is that users of the software don't pay for it. Don't confuse that with all software having to function this way. Like I said, OpenAI is a business. It isn't your personal charity. If you want more, pay for it.

asadotzler 1mo ago

If your free tier is marketed as a free tier but really it's just "your first hit is free" like your crack dealer's marketing, then it's a fraud on the user, a scam to get you hooked and paying. I am not an entitled user for thinking a free tier designed to provide half the answer and make me pay for the second half is a scam from an evil corporation and to call that out. Also, it is intended to be supported by ads, so it fits your ideal product description quite well despite being a scam.

robomartin 1mo ago
> "your first hit is free" like your crack dealer's marketing Oh, please. Don't use it then. Simple. Sign of entitlement: You get something of value for free, bitch about limitations and make-up bogus reasons to continue using the product without paying. If it is of value, use it and pay for it. If it isn't, do not use it and you have nothing to worry about. You are bitching about having access to untold billions of dollars of infrastructure and a massive amount of work from people who have lives and families FOR FREE. Get a grip dude. I use it for work, extensively, and I gladly pay for the services from a number of AI providers. I would gladly pay double. It's the no-brainer of the century: I can do months of work in weeks or less for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per month. I was talking to someone the other day who shares their Netflix account for four other families. Same thing, although, in this case, it's not entitlement, it's theft. They are both versions of the tragedy of the commons in various ways.
- ragequittah 1mo ago
  Most of the stuff I use is free and excellent. Linux, Firefox, libreoffice, xcp-ng, bottles, steam, playnite, opnsense, docker, dockhand, immich, freshrss, obsidian, tailscale, calibre, caddy, docker, pi-hole, signal, audiobookshelf I could probably keep going for a long while. I'm very glad most good software creators I've come across do not have your mindset.
  - robomartin 1mo ago
    None of these things are free my friend. They probably represent tens of billions of dollars in development over years, decades in some cases. You are missing the point entirely. Let's just take one: LibreOffice. This was a FOSS project from the very start. It is intended to be used as you use it. Even then, bitching about functionality and features would be entitled. In that case, if you don't like it, stop using it or participate in the development...for free, donating your time. ChatGPT is NOT a free product. Yes, they have a free tier. And that's fantastic. We've all used it. But this is not a FOSS company. Bitching about their free tier isn't right. Again, that's being entitled. Why do they owe you more than they are giving you? They do not. If you want more, pay for it. Or, you could buy a bunch of powerful computers and run an open weights model on your own hardware and have free intelligence to use as much as you want. Oh, wait, that wouldn't be free, would it? You'd have to pay thousands for the hardware. OK, wait, how about you do that and I use your self-hosted LLM's for free and then bitch about the lack of performance. Yup. Entitlement. Always a reason for other people to owe the entitled and never a reason for the entitled to owe them anything. And this goes way beyond what we are talking about here, far and wide. > I'm very glad most good software creators I've come across do not have your mindset. Here's something else you do not understand. FOSS isn't free to create, not even close. Take something like Linux. I would be comfortable estimating that Linux has probably a development cost in the one-hundred billion dollar range. I would not be surprised if was way more than that. The massive number of people who worked on Linux over the decades have lives, families, homes, responsibilities, etc. The only way Linux happened is because they are otherwise employed and donate their time (with is fantastic, I did a lot of of that when I was younger, had time and less responsibilities) or someone is explicitly paying for them to work on Linux because of the benefits they might derive from it. The only "free" part about FOSS is that users of the software don't pay for it. Don't confuse that with all software having to function this way. Like I said, OpenAI is a business. It isn't your personal charity. If you want more, pay for it.