Your temporary key has expired and was removed

[Wolf_Avatar]

I must admit that it makes me chuckle to see the customers complain about a FREE product.

I've been using this product for years and backed up hundreds of disks. I'm taking this "key outage" as a sign that I should probably bite the bullet and purchase it.

[Saltrams]

This is such a difficult situation, I believe both sides of the issue are valid and the free value I have had over the years has been really useful and by now I would have easily racked up sufficient use to make the 60 dollar/Euro/GBP charge negligible pro-rata but here's the thing; real life doesn't work that way. No one, NO ONE gets to the end of a long period of free use of anything and says that they are happy to cough up now, in retrospect.
Now I would genuinely, 100% like to pay for the product but have you looked at the cost of living crisis worldwide? Maybe that economics argument that says many more people will buy a cheap product so don't rely on wealthy folk buying an expensive one would actually work? (I don't know, I'm not good with money and figures). And I really understand that 60 isn't a lot for the actual work that goes into the creation of the software, the designer's skills are valuable...there's a "but" coming...but if EVERY free user paid, say 5 or 10 currency units and there was no free use, maybe the designer would be well rewarded and we wouldn't all be sitting here waiting on the key?
Just musing...

[Sparky101]

I must admit that it makes me chuckle to see the customers complain about a FREE product.

Can you call people who have never paid for a product 'customers'?

So you're shaming people for actually using a provided feature (the free key program)? The program is offered as freeware, so naturally some will use it as such. Nothing wrong with that. Some of those users will become customers at some point. I've been on the fence about it for a while but I don't use it often enough, and money is tight these days. I don't see anybody making a big issue out of the late key situation this month. I just see users asking reasonable questions, since there's just been silence about this.

It was a joke, lighten up. No one was being shamed, jeez.... But yeah, people who use a product for free are not customers, if you then choose to buy the product then you're a customer.

[emagin]

Regardless of users' status as free or paid, I think it is fair to ask for good communications:

Any product -- free-ware, free-mium, paid, etc. -- benefits from clear and timely communications to the user base. Whatever the situation (ending beta, payment processor issues, tired of leechers, personal problems, on vacation, ...) it's nice to see a short message so we are not left wondering what's up with the project.

This helps build trust and also keeps users loyal.

Just my .02