Tech has generous TC, lots of high-end laptops and phones worth thousands, AI & cloud spend, and yet the only acceptable price for secrets management is $0 it seems at times.
Many companies offer a free tier and a paid tier and are willing to incur the cost of users who will never convert. If a company doesn't actually intend to keep it "always free" they shouldn't make the promise in the first place
As soon as a company positions themselves to hold your data hostage, assume they will. I have no problem paying, but I’m not going to pay anyone trying to trap me. That’s the goal of most of these tech companies now.
My opinion and stubbornness doesn’t matter though. Identity control is getting lobbied into government legislation everywhere. Everyone’s going to pay no matter what, probably twice; once directly, once via taxes.
My advice would be… If that happens, you can worry about it then.
It seems you could lose a lot of time and sleep protecting yourself against a doomsday scenario that will probably never happen.
It means the old guard is moving away and potentially starting initiatives not in the best interest of the user. In the worst case scenario they will sell my data or introduce stupid changes that risk security.