Yes the main income is donations. The difference is that you don't need to pay if you can't afford it and people who donate are generally paying more on average. The huge difference is that everyone has access to everything without paying.

Imagine what would happen if you would have to pay to use Wikipedia: nobody would use it. The content is made by users and if they would have made it a paid encyclopedia it wouldn't have any users.

[–] SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Also, I gladly pay for subscriptions for services that actually cost money to run in the developer's side.

But that's not the case. It shows content from a free service. I get it that developers need to get paid, but if they don't have any recurring expenditure, it should be based on donations.

[–] blunderworld@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

You don't need to pay for Sync if you can't afford it either, though. A free version exists, the only noteworthy difference is that it shows ads. To your point, there are technically a few gated features behind the Ultra subscription, but these are niche inclusions that 99% of people probably wouldn't use even if they were included for free. I think of them more as an added bonus for supporting the dev.