Yeah, all software should be free, I mean it's not like it's hard to make, or that people need to eat. Rather than posting negative comments, why not try building an OS tool and giving back to the community in a positive way?

I don't get it, the product is free for individuals. Teams can afford to pay for this especially on the company's dime. It's crazy that Sofya and her team even poured years of their lives to provide such an awesome service like the noun project (for free). They've already given a lot to the design community.

Now imagine if they had more money, how much more they could push the industry forward. As a creator, it's important to remember that real people make the things we use, including this free designer news website. I know it's the norm to not pay for software just like its the norm for designers to not create products people pay for. We need to use our skills to create better business models, sustainable products, and offerings for users, so that creators like Sofya can build even more new ideas.

If we want our toolset to evolve faster, we need to support the people that are putting themselves out there to bring change. The community constantly talking about a tool and sharing it with others is much more powerful than you think.

Our CEO wrote a piece about pricing models I think explains our position quite well.

https://medium.com/@sofyapolyakov/why-users-should-want-to-pay-for-services-they-love-30ddc7d52a95#.lr192s9e4

while it is true that creating a tool like this consumes resources and you can't just live from nothing, I also understand where this is coming from.

I'd put it differently though. It is not the fact that it is a priced tool, its the fact, that nowadays people rarely make something to purely solve a problem for the community, but instead they think about how they can make more money by milking the designer community.

I said it several times before, it has become a bit of a cycle. The young designer/developer starts out in the industry, makes some client work or does work for themselves, like making a web project for this gaming guild, after a certain time they get very frustrated because their vision and craft are not appreciated by the people they work with and after all, what we as a community portrait always makes it look like all we make is perfect things, even though that is not the least bit true. So they decide to "make a product", because that is always more motivational in the long term and they get to make decisions by themselves and only have to deal with direct end customer feedback. And oh surprise, because all you hear nowadays is how you need to make something that is authentic to yourself, they interpret it as "you need to make something that you already know about", so they target themselves, designer/developer. And so it goes on.

The thing is though:

• no money in it == evolving slowly and kind of crappy at some small points that will start to add up, but its free and it mostly will evolve organically
• money in == evolving quickly and will be mostly well done, besides the things that it'll miss, those will be added in a patch along the road, but it will be determined by the market and the flow of money and attention.

As soon as there is money involved, you will need to get it back somehow, unless you work on donations.