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I really don't think he's hurting for funds.
VCs typically want a return on their 57 million dollar investment.
And people warned about this when they announced it.
This is a sign those warnings were valid.
Seems you misunderstand the issue. Anyone not deploying to Laravel Cloud but using that project seems to be impacted by this, even going so far that agents are confused about it and keeps insisting users should deploy to Laravel Cloud instead.
Maybe I'm a grumpy old developer, but that does not sound like "improve the ecosystem for everyone using it", sounds like good old spam taken to the next level.
It's not wrong to beg for money, but I'm also not going to joyfully tolerate a hassle because of gratitude or appreciation for past decisions the beggar made without my input.
Tip: Nobody can meaningfully conceptualize or care about the number of minutes. "Ten years" would've been fine, and more convincing.
There are plenty of ways to promote your product. Injecting ads into agents and PR's is not the way to do it.
I understand that he wants to get paid for his work, but he can charge for it like everybody else. No need to be a asshole by building the product for "free" and then bundling ad-ware.