I would rather pay an upfront fee, or even a subscription of some kind than have this crap shoved in my nose. I’m firmly in the camp of believing there’s nothing wrong with closed software that the devs want to earn money from, but this modern method is so fucking annoying I’ll use basically anything else
Yeah, intentionally making a service or product worse to force feed obtrusive ads isn’t the only way companies can make money from it. Once they start doing that it becomes an ad platform that sometimes offers a service, rather than a service that has ads.
I think platforms like patreon are the real way forward. If you have a product or service that people want, you can even offer it for free, but people will support you financially if they believe in what you’re doing. The added beauty of this is that there really is no upper limit. You could add an “ultra platinum” tier for $150 a month and one wealthy investor could make a huge difference in your project.
Also, I don’t even think ads are the devil. I get why they exist, and I understand why they make so much money. I’m fine being advertised to, because I know what I’m interested in and am very skeptical. I think I’ve had one ad sway me into buying a product I’d never heard of until that point. What I do hate is when the actual advertised product takes a backseat to the massive amounts of data harvesting/brokerage that comes with the advertising industry.
Nobody is stopping you. Go ahead and buy a Garmin.
I’d make a 100 bet, you question the people in this thread 75%+ of them have no experience buying an atlas for $20 a year and would scoff at the price of buying new maps every year.
We already lived through this shit when GPS became common in the early 00s and EVERYONE bitched about paying for new maps.