I don't think it is equivalent, because the Infamous Dropbox Comment is about the behaviour of non-technical consumers. There's a pretty vast chasm between a non-technical consumer trying to set up rsync and a software developer adding a Trello <-> GitHub integration.
It does seem frivolous to me to pay money to automatically close tasks when a linked pull request is merged.
And paying $720 annually to host some frontends? Depending on what they mean by "frontend", this might actually be exactly $720 more than they ought to be spending on this.
It's very equivalent. Developers have a hard on for saying "I don't need to pay $5/mo for this when I can just build it in a weekend myself" Then they half ass something that took them probably a month of fiddling to make happen, then they're so vested in this idea that their homegrown bastardization is superior that they spend more time justifying the insane loopholes and workarounds to make it somewhat usable...
It doesn't take "a month of fiddling" to add an integration like this. It's already readily available[0] and has been for half a decade. It's also $24 per month — not $5 — at their current scale. These aren't amounts to be sniffed at either. The $720 a year they're paying for "frontend hosting" is not far off what I pay my accountant.
It does seem frivolous to me to pay money to automatically close tasks when a linked pull request is merged.
And paying $720 annually to host some frontends? Depending on what they mean by "frontend", this might actually be exactly $720 more than they ought to be spending on this.