Basically this. Once you establish a track record of paying for things, you will be expected to pay for everything.
It’s not only feature requests. I’ve filed bug reports on open source projects complete with example reproduction cases and summaries of my debug knowledge, only to have the maintainers demand money for it. In the last case, the bug was a show-stopper that led us to switch to a different library, but I thought I’d do them a favor and share my knowledge as we switched. The response was a snarky reply about how we need to hire and pay them if we want it fixed (even though we didn’t need it any more).
Lately I’ll just submit big reports from my personal email/account to avoid this whole back and forth.
It’s not only feature requests. I’ve filed bug reports on open source projects complete with example reproduction cases and summaries of my debug knowledge, only to have the maintainers demand money for it. In the last case, the bug was a show-stopper that led us to switch to a different library, but I thought I’d do them a favor and share my knowledge as we switched. The response was a snarky reply about how we need to hire and pay them if we want it fixed (even though we didn’t need it any more).
Lately I’ll just submit big reports from my personal email/account to avoid this whole back and forth.