Just to be super clear here about my plans with PoLo and other Ham2K projects:
PoLo is “free, as in speech”. It’s Open Source, and will remain open source.
PoLo is “free, as in beer”. It’s available at no charge. All the features you see right now will always remain free. I will NOT do a “bait and switch” on users later.
But developing and running PoLo is not free to me. There are significant monthly costs, not to mention all my time.
Right now our users have been very generous with their contributions thru the app and Buy Me A Coffee and we can cover those monthly costs.
But new features, like Cloud Sync, might have significantly higher costs that cannot be covered with donations alone, so we might have to charge a fee to use them.
And other potential new features might not be useful for a broader audience, but very valuable for a small number of users so perhaps putting them behind a donation would be a way to make it worth developing. I’m not saying I’m planning to do this, just that it is a possibility.
I summary, my intentions are that whatever is free now will always be free (and open source!), some services might have a cost, but it should be reasonable, and perhaps some new features might also have a cost, but again it should be reasonable.
And if I fail to deliver on this promise, someone else can take the open source code, fork the app into their own version (with a new name, mind you!) and try to offer it themselves.