While unfortunate for consumers I get it. Usually consumer customers use more support than business ones while paying significantly less and element still has to make enough money to keep going.
Yeah, I hope Element manages to become sustainable. It feels like they are running out of funding from what they did in the last month.
But on the other side, existing customers don't use much support, once everything is set and working, it's all profit for them.
Kicking out customers equals to giving up money. I don't think many of them would start paying double (from $3 per user to $5 per user) or more (you gonna pay for 20 users even if you have 10) instead of just renting a VPS and do it for free
I can assure you existing customers(non business) do still use a disproportionate amount of support. Things like feature requests, lost passwords, new user on boarding, any time anything doesn't work as the user expects, etc
As for the finances here sure it gives up some income but will also free up a lot of time for someone who is currently doing support so they could focus on other things
Big deal, just self host in a VPS if you're willing to pay $$$.
Don't make the mistake though of self hosting (Dendrite) as it will just choke, in my case it was a single user instance subscribed to only a handful of channels but apparently that was too much for my server to load messages in any manner that would be considered quick.
I've self hosted several services at once on there but apparently Matrix is just too heavy too handle compared to other things.
