[preommr]

Perhaps unpopular opinion, but it's because the 0$ cost is what 99% of OSS users care about.

Since it requires no investment on part of the user, it increases the potential target market to a much larger size than it would if it were paid. There's just something about things being free that break people's minds.

There's even a study on this where they offered chocolates for free vs 0.01$, and the free option was much more popular even though the 0.01$ chocolate was much higher quality and much better value for a very negligible difference.

Lots of users just want to download something, use it for a few minutes and be done with it. Or at least try it out and know that they can fall back to a free version at worst and not feel like they made a bad investment.

[mcmoor]

I think this is more that pay barrier significantly raises obstacle no matter how much money you actually have to give. Even as little as 10^-10 cent. Just by nature of transaction verification have a hard cost no matter how much money actually transferred.

What would finally vanquish ads off the internet is micro transaction that is actually able to bypass this barrier entirely. This is what bitcoin promised to do but of course, they don't solve real problems.