Well to be fair, he's been building and updating the app for 10 years now and just porting it over to Lemmy recently if you want to look at it that way. It's not an entirely new app out of the blue.
People deserve to be paid for their labor. This is Lemmy; that's the default position given our history. There are plenty of free as in beer and speech apps out there if someone doesn't or can't pay the price.
But software development is hard work, especially if it isn't a hobby. And a lot of Lemmy apps are hobbyists. That's the communtiy phase we are in right now. And we are a smaller community, which means fewer paying customers, which means a higher overall cost. LJ can't throw out an app for $5 and expect a hundred thousand to convert into paying customers off the backs of over a million downloads.
I'll never understand this criticism of Sync. I hate subscriptions as much as most people, but with software it sort of makes sense because the work never ends. It isn't like buying a bookcase or any other static item. And Sync, in this case, isn't like what companies such as LG are doing where they are intoducing forced subscriptions into static firmware to extract maximum wealth from customers.
I mean, yeah, obviously the dev would rather people pay the subscription when some of the Ultra features require server work and/or continued costs (translation, OCR, etc.).
Developing Sync is his full time job, which is why it initially shipped without a lifetime tier. People voiced their opinion and the dev listened by adding the lifetime option and the ad free option. If you don't like the pricing, use a different app. Nobody is forcing you to use Sync. LJ doesn't owe you the app for free (or any price outside of what he feels is fair).
As someone who bought lifetime ultra on sync for reddit the day he announced the shut down it's a price worth paying. Used the app for almost 10 years and only paid 5 bucks. He wasn't sure what was going to happen going forward so I gave what I could in return for that service.
You have ads on Lemmy though. Which is free and open source software whos developers disagree with the idea of an ad driven internet. Paying for it to remove the ads isn't any better though as you are rewarding this kind of behavior.
No, putting ads in software to the point that it is annoying enough to pay someone to make them go away. Selling software without this strategy is respectable.
Basically said what I would have. The app takes work. Work deserves reward. Donations usually aren't proper reward for work put in. I value the work the dev put in.
We know it took about 360 hours. That's a shit load of work and it will be a daily job maintaining it. Besides that lifetime price is entirely optional
The guy who is making Connect did its initial release in 4 or 5 days, I remember I tried it, he was updating multiple times a day in the beginning, impressive