As much as I sympathise with this person and what he's doing, I must say I agree with you. > This is essentially an appeal to charity. ...the problem is that

As much as I sympathise with this person and what he's doing, I must say I agree with you. > This is essentially an appeal to charity. ...the problem is that it's not even very clearly an appeal to charity. It's sort of blurring a freemium opencore commercial model with charity. Paying for the premium-tier of a freemium product is one possible message to put out there. An appeal to charity is quite another. They are different messages appealing to different motivations. But when combined, they sort of diminish each other's effectiveness as a possible sales message. If I get into my charitable frame of mind, it produces cognitive dissonance to think that maybe this project doesn't need my charity if there are commercial users out there who can sustain the product by paying for the premium tier (as well they should if they make profitable use of the premium features). If I get into my business purchaser frame of mind, it produces cognitive dissonance to hear the author talk of my purchasing decision as an act of charity. It makes me think that even the sales guy acknowledges that I won't be getting anything worth what I'm paying for here. Not only that, but they also imply very different kinds of contracts, and as someone paying for this, I'd like to know which contract I'm getting into. If it's a commercial contract, I expect some kind of warranty that everything will work, and some kind of support or right to my money back if it doesn't. That's just implied in a commercial deal of any kind. (And frequently that's the piece in an open core business model that you pay for when you pay for the premium tier). So if I pay, and I take my problem to the source, I don't then want to hear "Sorry, can't help you out, but I did say from the beginning that the money I took from you was more of a donation than a payment for a commercial deal of any kind, and it's kind of uncharitable of you to now expect me to fix your problem if it distracts me from building new features which, ostensibly, you were supposed to be supporting."