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?

“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.

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?

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.

Then again, isn’t that what people used to do with StackOverflow?

Yes, one of the major issues with StackOverflow that answerers complained about a lot was the “XY problem.”.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem

Where you’re trying to do X, but because you’re inexperienced you erroneously decide Y must be the solution even though it is a dead end, and then ask people how to do Y instead of X.

ChatGPT drives that problem up to 11 because it has no problems enabling you to focusing on Y far longer than you should be.