Hey Ben!

I'm actually helping out the growl team work towards 1.4. That's entirely an option. This model is similar to Textmate and XChat which remain open source but if you want to download the binary version you can either pay for them a well tested version from a trusted source to help support the project or find any number of the third party builds from questionable sources.

Paying the $2 gives you unlimited updates forever in the store and helps support a full time dev working on the project is all. Growl is used by thousands but is maintained by 4ish people people (and now me) in their free time and it doesn't get the attention it needs.

(On another note, we should grab a drink sometime! Haven't ran into you in months!)