Nobody can really be surprised by that, though? Meaning people who sign up are aware that it could happen eventually?
Everybody should realize that:
* there is no free lunch
* a VC-funded business is looking to maximize user base and then get sold, so as a customer you are likely looking at a time horizon of ~3-4 years: plan accordingly
* if a niche B2B SaaS offers pricing below $40/month, it's not sustainable and will disappear, so plan accordingly
* if anybody offers you stuff for free, something is wrong, so take advantage at your own peril
But most people do not realize all that, and expect things to be free forever, pay for software once, or for complex B2B applications to be available forever at $5-$19/month.
My biggest issue with the whole model is that by offering a free tier or by subsidizing everything for "~3-4 years" the VC funded companies make it difficult for anyone to build a business that charges fair value from day 1.
It's hard to deal with because so many people are choosing the "free" option that if you try to pick something that charges fair value, you could end up picking a losing side. Or, even worse, there aren't any alternatives and you get to choose between dying on a hill or running to the slaughterhouse along with the rest of the herd.
Look as Visual Studio Code vs Visual Studio Online. Watch as VSO slowly gets more features than VSC. It'll happen slowly, and intentionally, but VSO will eventually be significantly better than VSC. Then start to think about the integration MS can do with GitHub and Azure to streamline the development process and you get to the point where everything else is an inferior product.
Now we're paying $1k+ per year for a code editor that used to be "free". Right now it's possible to sacrifice time in place of money for almost everything, but I'm worried we'll hit a point where a lot of the development process has been usurped by SaaS offerings and the only way to play will be to pay.
I agree that VC funding makes it difficult to charge reasonable fees. It hurts everyone: both businesses and customers in the long term.
I would not mix a discussion of SaaS into this. I personally believe that subscriptions are the only sustainable way to develop and maintain software these days. "Buying" software, "owning" it forever and using it on rapidly changing operating systems and environments is fiction.
