Why I Pay for Draft and Other Free Products

I feel like this is as good a place as any to plug Gittip (https://www.gittip.com/) if you haven't heard of it.

You basically set up weekly donations to people through Twitter/GitHub. The best sell I can think of is for those well-versed in Python: how much time do you think Requests has saved you? An hour a month? How much do you value that hour? Let's be crazy conservative and say you value it $20/hr.

Kenneth Reitz saves you $20 a month. What's wrong with throwing him a little piece of that pie?

https://www.gittip.com/kennethreitz/

Well put, same sentiments here exactly (and same products!).

Thanks. :) Which free products do you pay for?

TL;DR of the article: I pay for them because I mainly want to support the people behind them.

And that's why I bought Sublime Text although I could have kept using it for free

I'm glad you brought up Sublime. They were a big inspiration to how I wanted to charge for Draft. I love their model. It really makes trying out the entire tool super easy, and still allows the people who do get a lot of value from it to pay for it.

I pay Quoterobot for the same reasons and will be doing the same for postach.io