Although I'm totally with you on the part about not building a business around someone else's free service, this does seem somewhat unreasonable on PhotoBucket's part.
It's free until they change it. If you build your e-commerce business on shaky ground (free services) there's an inherent risk it gets pulled out from under you at any moment.
Maybe people shouldn't expect much from free services, but free services also then shouldn't expect much from its users (i.e. that they might get angry quickly and drop their service on a whim).
> If you build your... business on shaky ground (free services) there's an inherent risk it gets pulled out from under you at any moment.
This also very much applies to Photobucket. This could very well be the thing that kills it.
When it shuts down or asks for money it's a cost/benefit analysis. There's companies that let you host for free, but eventually if all companies charge then they'll end up paying.
I don't have any issue with users hopping from free service to free service but there's no contract between the parties with a free service besides that a TOS can change at any moment.
People are more just questioning this decision from Photobucket's end: The sudden change in TOS is unlikely to go over well, and the price seems extremely steep. One wonders whether charging $10/month and sending out several explicit announcements beforehand would've resulted in a much better outcome. That being said, I'll concede that this move may turn out to be brilliant for Photobucket, so I suppose we'll see what happens.
To make an analogy: Sure, you're free to be an asshole to people. No one's questioning that technically you have the right to be one. But don't be surprised when people don't want to be around you anymore, and if your goal is to make friends (customers) one wonders why you would decide on that course of action.
There's nothing special about payment that makes such tactics impossible. Only their reputation keeps most companies from doing something like that.
You can have a completely valid contractual relationship between two parties even if one side doesn't pay the other. In the real world, you can even acquire certain rights based on someone letting you do something long enough. Always walked through the neighbour's garden to get to your car faster? Some legal systems will consider this an established right after some time.
Can you provide any examples of real life cases where something like walking through your neighbor'a garden became an established right? I'd be interested to see as that just feels like a hyperbole to me.
If you want lots of example, Google “prescriptive easement cases”.
...
"Fuck you, we have your stuff hostage, pay us."
"On 26 June, however, the company published a brief note advising users to "take a moment to review our updated terms and policies"."
Photobucket told its users that they were going to charge extra, but it was a bit sneaky