This is why on principle I almost 99.99% refuse to invest time or money in any app or service that is an ongoing cost that can be taken away or enshittified.

It needs to not collect data, have a single purchase (or yearly feature update subscriptions that don't affect the underlying functionality that is permanently available to me as a user) and if there's any doubt about that I'm looking for the next, more permanent solution + negative review for enshittifiers

If it is not open source, and you are not paying, someone else is and you are the product.

There was an iOS app I used like this that did a great job of scanning text books.

After I used it for about 6 months this exact thing happened. Started charging fees for many different things.

Exporting images as pdf had a charge, then scanning to make the text searchable had a fee.

I just exported as jpg and used imagic and ocrmypdf to take care of this.

Then I learned that iOS has a built in scanner in the files app, so I just switched to that one.

This is a great post. Additionally, if the exploitation isn't occurring in a ramp up of costs to use basic functions of the service, it's definitely occurring somewhere else and likely at the expense of your privacy.

I was able to talk my org into leaving Meetup for the same reasons. It's just progressively getting worse, advertising to our users while simultaneously raising fees. Removing the ability to sync calendars. They also won't give us the email addresses of any of our users unless we upgrade to "pro" (for an additional fee, of course), and even then, only the ones who RSVP to our events.

Raising fees is one thing, but doing so while removing features and adding just blatant irrelevant advertisements aint gonna work for me.