There's endless free support from hundreds of helpful bitcoiners on Nostr and social, but I don't expect Start9 to fund it for no reason.

We can just go to BTCSessions youtube channel or search the web or peruse the github or stackoverflow or whatever. There is literally no shortage of places where we can all get tons of help with these devices and the open source community around it. I am also happy to help, but I'm not *obligated* to do so, and I certainly don't think Start9 is after they built an awesome OS and made it open source and available when they pay a lot of money to their employees and have very precious and limited time to devote to it.

And sorry, don't give me the "$25 would've been fine" because people would've complained about that too. The simple fact is no one is obligated to pay a high price for support to help random users who provide nothing to them, and nobody should expect them to. 

The only proper response is "thank you" and moving on. They owe nobody anything. LESS so because they already gave us *enormous* value entirely for free despite them probably spending a few hundred thousand building it, maybe more. It being open source is *less* of a reason to demand something from them, not more.

TL;DR
Open source is a COMMUNITY, not someone building something for us for free and then dedicating their life to support also for free, while we all demand more from them.  It is US who are obligated to give support to each other if we want it. Start9 owes us nothing. 

 Well that’s what they have been doing for a while now. And of course it’s up to them to do what they think is right and necessary for the project. I’m not giving you the $ 25 would have been fine, I just am of the opinion maybe a limited duration but lower price point option would actually create more revenue. I really hope it will turn out to be the right decision. I do not agree with the “random users who provide nothing to them”. I think Start9 got a lot of very useful feedback from a lot of those random users, i.e. the community aspect you are talking about.