I had a similar experience when I released an open source real estate search plugin for Wordpress years ago. It gained traction and was covered by a few very pr

I had a similar experience when I released an open source real estate search plugin for Wordpress years ago. It gained traction and was covered by a few very prominent real estate blogs/news sites which resulted in over 10,000 downloads in 2 weeks. There were some people who were not able to get it to work with their theme, shared hosting environment, other plugin conflicts, etc. and expected me to install/troubleshoot. I was spending almost my entire day trying to help people and I couldn't handle the demand especially with that many downloads in such a short period of time. So I decided to put up paid support versions ranging from $50 to $150. People flipped out when I did that and literally attacked me in comment threads. I tried explaining the time commitment this entailed and that it was taking me away from my core business but the mob didn't care. They were mad that I wasn't willing to install or troubleshoot their environment for free. I ended up taking the plugin down and since then (it's been 7 years) I haven't open sourced anything major and will probably never release a Wordpress plugin to the public again. In hindsight, I probably could have made decent money from that plugin if I charged for it initially. It probably would not have gained as much traction or popularity but I think the outcome would have been very different.