If it is not open source, and you are not paying, someone else is and you are the product.
Bonus: You could be paying and be the product anyway.
This is why on principle I almost 99.99% refuse to invest time or money in any app or service that is an ongoing cost that can be taken away or enshittified.
It needs to not collect data, have a single purchase (or yearly feature update subscriptions that don’t affect the underlying functionality that is permanently available to me as a user) and if there’s any doubt about that I’m looking for the next, more permanent solution + negative review for enshittifiers
KDE Plasma recently added a once-annually notification requesting donations to the KDE e.V. (who pay for things like server infrastructure to support the project). Is this past your line, or acceptable?
I can handle that.
- its a donation
- its a presumably good product I want to continue to be funded and developed
- once a year