Worst part was while I decided against using it, it still took a while before I found a replacement.
Seriously: Monthly payments, and not only $1 for an alarm app, and then they have the gall to try to get away with tracking me on top of it..!
But sometimes I feel myself slipping closer and closer to your much more cynical ideas.
In particular I remember donating what for me was a good chunk of money to Caddy right before they started "experimenting with business models" or whatever he called it. Same goes for happily paying WhatsApp, walking around like a living talking billboard for it only to have them sell out to Facebook shortly after.
Just two examples from the top of my mind.
History has taught us that an enforced rule of law is the only way to prevent scammers from being the dominate players (by number, not size) in a market.
Law makes cheating less adaptive. But even without law, cheats would not exceed some small minority.
They added ChatGPT and all sorts of other shit to it unfortunately but the core functionality is still good
You can't even buy your way out of it like people suggest. The fact that you want to do that signals you have money and makes your data even more valuable. Even companies that do not do this currently, assuming they are publicly traded, with eventual succumb. They just need a bad quarter or a few people needing to boost their metrics and they'll add the new revenue source.
People try to justify everything they do and this is one the worst of them. Some even seemed to use this as an argument against open source which is usually free.
Along the same lines there is "What is your monetization plan?".
The next one I wish would go away is the "but they have a privacy policy" line of thinking. Like that means anything.