Tech companies should not be able to offer something for free and then later charge for it. It should be illegal and prosecuted as anticompetitive behavior. It'

Tech companies should not be able to offer something for free and then later charge for it. It should be illegal and prosecuted as anticompetitive behavior. It's not at all fair to potential competition, who can't beat free and therefore don't enter the marketplace. It's just a way to try and capture a whole market unfairly. Then when the price goes up you can end up with regretful consumers who may have chosen another option if not for the misleading pricing. If they want to do this, it should have to say in big bold font "this is free for now and we will charge for it later, you will have X months of warning before being required to pay at that time". In some non-software industries this is already considered illegal behavior: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) I'd personally even go so far as to say that there should be some legislation around using very cheap loss-inducing prices for extended periods of time to capture the market and then jacking them back up. Like how Ubers used to cost ~30% of what they do now in San Francisco. But that's a lot harder to specify as there are legitimate use cases for sales and loss leaders.