Why 'free' proprietary software will always end in tears

Heja is a free 'Software as a Service' (SaaS) application that's quite compelling and useful.

Heja 's development is funded by generous Venture Capitalists ( VC ) - wealthy business investors - who sent Heja $6 million to build the product.

Users will be very excited... but then things your organisation used to do no problem will suddenly be met with jaunty message: "upgrade now to Premium Heja to undertake [task name]" Then they will start reducing the elements of the service available under the 'free tier' to the 'Premium' service.

Proprietary software developers - who exert total control over their software - have a myriad of ways to subtly enshittify your experience of their 'free tier' and badger you into buying the premium version.

They can reduce your ability to access or export your own data in their system (holding data hostage) or collaborate with others, or any number of other - often seemingly insignificant - arbitrary limitations... until you want or need them.

The way to nip this vicious cycle in the bud is to not use a VC -funded profit-motivated startup's proprietary product.

For now, they're just avoiding those things (using ad hoc email to fill in the gaps). But the die is cast. To view more, they'd have to upgrade to the premium version.

As you can imagine, I was shocked. As a result, I'm not sure how long it will be.