That's fine. We're not looking to convince anyone. We are recognizing that we have something useful now, and that there are people who are willing to pay for it now. We are providing it to those people, and making it known that we believe the application is still not ready to be called 1.0.

We happily admit that a paid beta program is a bit of an experiment, but it's hardly unprecedented. See Mac OS X Public Beta for an example. We do not want to set up the false expectation that Atlas is free. It isn't.