> "we'll release a free thing, have no way to generate income, lose money for a few years, and then beg for a million dollars." That's not a business plan. That's a waste of your time & your users' time.

This is literally the foundation story of numerous billion-dollar businesses. In fact OpenAI managed to beg their way into a trillion dollars after losing money offering no kind of product for many years. It sounds like it's just a business plan that you don't like very much.

Off the top of my head, I believe Twitter, Youtube, Discord, Reddit, Imgur each had no monetization at all for the first 3~5 years of their existence. Or more recently there was uv, that write-it-in-Rust Python package manager that had no avenue for monetization but received millions in investment funding a team working on it full-time until successfully getting bought out by OpenAI.