WordPress plugins and the removal of features

A recent discussion on Reddit was about shaming plugin developers who offer free features and then take them away (with the assumption being that they make them part of the paid-for version).

Now, I don’t agree with shaming, but I don’t think it’s a great policy. As a site owner, if I’d spent some time looking for the best plugin, implementing it and integrating its features, only for the developer – out of nowhere – to put one of the features I use behind a pay-wall, I’d be less than happy. My choice now would be to go back and find another plugin, which may not even be possible if important data was not transferable between plugins, implementing it, etc., or to pay. It feels like blackmail in a way.

But I understand why developers do it sometimes too. I see 2 reasons why this might happen…

1. They implement a free version to get people interested in buying a premium version, but not enough people do because you gave them too much in the free model
2. They intentionally give certain free features to users to get them using the plugin, with the intention of later removing them, to try and push them to their premium version

Either way it kinda sucks, as a user, to be put in this position, though.

A plugin shop owner, however, disagreed that this was anything bad…

Why shame someone who gave away something for completely free, on their own time, effort, energy and maybe money for a X amount of time?

Shouldn’t the general consensus be: “let’s be happy we enjoyed using X for free for so long”?

I think you never realised FREE also has a price tag – and it’s the price tag of having a feature removed over night.

I still don’t understand why people expect software, for free, no strings attached – if I built it once and decide after 6 months this is taking up way too much time and I want to shut it all down I should expect backlash?

What do you think? Is this one of those situations where plugin developers are going to be of one view and customers another? Let me know in the comments.