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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Personally, I don't feel that analogy is a fair comparison.
Begging a dev for new features for free would definitely be entitlement, because it's demanding more, but what OP is upset about is reduction in the service they already had.
I don't think any free tier user of any service could have any right to be upset if new features were added only for paying customers, but changing the free tier level is different.
In my opinion, even if you aren't paying for it, the free tier is a service level like any other. People make decisions about whether or not to use a service based on if the free tier covers their needs or not. Companies will absolutely try to upsell you to a higher tier and that's cool, that's business after all, but they shouldn't mess around with what they already offered you.
When companies offer a really great free tier but then suddenly reduce what is on it, then in my opinion that's a baiting strategy. They used a compelling offering to intentionally draw in a huge userbase (from which they benefit) and build up the popularity and market share of the service, and then chopped it to force users - who at this point may be embedded and find it difficult to switch - to pay.
So yeah, it doesn't matter in my opinion that the tier is free. It's still a change in what you were promised after the fact, and that's not cool regardless of whether there is money involved or not.
Free tier is a baiting strategy. Period.
As an example: a company starts a free tier offering with no promises. It can sustain that because there are enough free users that convert into paying users - enough to sustain the free tier. But times change and the cost of free tier users surpasses that of paying users. Should the company continue providing the same level of service for free tier users?
Also, what other term than entitlement would you use for somebody gets something for free, is not promised that it will stay free forever, the free offering is cancelled or limited, and the user starts complaining?
Anti Commercial-AI license
"Times changing" here seems to be the central trick to the argument.
What's interesting about enshittification is that as the company gets more and more profitable there seems to be more and more excuses as to why these free features are so costly.
It's very easy for a company to put out a statement that times are changing and that the free tier is unaffordable. Is that always true? Who's to say?
I'm sure sometimes it is true but the doubt is why arguments like this will never go away.
What other term than incompetent would you use for a company that puts out a free product, attracts a bunch of free users, abruptly cuts access for those features and puts it behind a paywall, and then acts surprised when those same users complain about it.
If you want to make a business move go ahead, it's your right, but accept the complaints from your user base you predictably pissed off.
To me there's a major difference depending on the cost of the provided service. I don't know what features crowdsec provides, but if it's mostly providing lists and all the blocking etc happens locally, I don't see how they lose much money on this free service. Gathering the lists is something they'd have to do anyway to service their paying customers.
If Cloudflare stopped making Cloudflare Tunnels free to use, I'd be more understanding since bandwidth costs them relevant amounts of money.