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by dylan604 1322 days ago
I see it as a way of getting paid for the development of services. People willing to pay for an offering are more likely to provide quality feedback. Once it is stable there and dev time has been recouped, you can offer it to the free tier.

I actually don't have an issue with that. Once it is available to free tier users, it frees up the devs to go to the next item on the list once again only available to the paid users. Lather, rinse, repeat. Sounds like a fairly sound bizplan.
2 comments
lo_zamoyski 1322 days ago
> I see it as a way of getting paid for the development of services.

The obvious reason is that a company has an incentive to make it easy to onboard and no incentive to help you migrate off or even an incentive to make it difficult or costly to leave. I don't see how making import/export something only a payed tier has is specifically or especially for funding development. It's not the deal breaker or the reason people choose Protonmail over others, even if it can be a consideration.

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dylan604 1322 days ago
Do you not agree that the types of support requests or other feedback from the masses in the free tier tends to be of a much lower quality than you might get from a paid user? The expense of supporting those requests are not insignificant. By ensuring that the product is in a much more stable state before reaching the free tier can help keep those support costs lower.

>It's not the deal breaker or the reason people choose Protonmail over others, even if it can be a consideration.

Yet here we are on a dev centric forum talking about it being a "bad" decision. From a dev perspective, the decision of starting something in a paid tier then (if ever) releasing to the free tier is not offensive to me. A company offers a free thing that has fewer features than a paid tier, "news at 11" type of story it is not. Doing poor research into the limitations of the free tier and complaining publicly about not having access to the paid features on the free tier is also not news worthy. Again, yet, here we are.

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impetus21 1322 days ago
Hey Dylan I saw your comment on USPS api. I am very much unguided on how to use it. Can you please email me? I don't know how to use it and I even called them, no luck! Please email me. --impetus1 a t protonmail(dot)com.>
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