I think people see the "pricing" and are turned off. The base is completely free! Some of the ecosystem is not. The big selling point for me, is the size of the library. HTMX and Alpine are a bit larger. The downside for me is needing to have a template type that supports streaming. (Thymeleaf in Java vs JTE) My controllers also have imperative code to support the streaming. None of this is enough of a turnoff however. For my simple apps, I'm extremely happy with how simple both HTMX and Datastar make my logic. (I replaced a React front-end and got rid of the whole build step).