I agree that storage cost is completely marginal and I am quite sure they had a sustainable ratio of paying to free users (otherwise they'd have made completely different decisions or shut the service down). In my experience, LastPass had one of the best brand reputations among password managers, and LogMeIn can do "good software" (but not sell it sensibly to anyone but enterprise audiences it seems). That's down the drain now of course, which certainly is a shame.
7 trackers and the purposeful deterioration of the free tier can only be explained by greed, I think. (Unfortunately, we'll likely never know the true decision-making process that went into this but come on, it's a game of probabilities).
So I had it installed on all of my family and friend's computers to use it occasionally when they had trouble.
Then one day they changed license and you couldn't use them anymore.
I had to move to TeamViewer.
So I had to move on to... nothing actually, now I'm using the Windows-integrated "Quick Assist" feature which works fairly well (but requires a Microsoft account unfortunately).
The irony of claiming this is a free service when the service uses 7 trackers. The free service is a product!
Edit: I'm actually not sure about all of them.
Mixpanel and Segment are not ad trackers, they're used for profiling and habit-tracking and essentially to get into people's brains (understand their decision making, interactions etc.). It's not advertising, it's much worse. They're also so-called "first-party customer data collection tools". The raw gold nuggets that get sold on. You could call it "people-data trafficking".
Then they have four (4) Google trackers in it. Again, yes, technically not for advertising. But how we can call anything with the name "Google" in it "not advertising", well come on, seriously, I know we all like to delude ourselves sometimes (I sure know I do) but that might be a bit of a stretch ;-)
A single one of these trackers might be legitimate in a software such as this (privacy-centric, a highly sensitive service that's supposed you keep all your secrets or at least manage access to them), in that it tracks UI issues, errors, crashes etc. and helps developers to quickly improve the product and create a better UX. But the rest is heavy data mining equipment. They're not the ones who'll do the advertising but you WILL be advertised to with the data collected here, make no mistake.
Trello is currently evolving into a full-fledged project management tool and they fuel growth by adding new features to business class only. While that's not leaving the best taste either, I can understand.
When they tried to limit Trello Gold further, we retaliated so hard so, they relaxed their policies a bit.
I don't need their new features since it's not well organized for individuals but, they neither change the price of Trello Gold, nor remove features from it. It's a good compromise.
So when you're building a brand you have to ask, how much is the bad press and the millions of disappointed users worth to you? You have to understand, users you're losing this way are never coming back because you have nothing to offer them anymore. And they'll tell their friends, family, colleagues, bosses and just like that you lose a huge userbase.
OTOH, if you treat your free users with respect, chances are they'll recommend you left and right and a percentage of these recommendations is bound to convert to paying customers. Of course if you're greedy and want to milk your customers for all they're worth and you don't really care about the long-term success of your product or your brand, then by all means, go for it.
Another thought experiment: Imagine I gave you a generous gift for your birthday, like a new gaming laptop. You'd be using it for a few months, you'd finally throw out your old desktop PC and create your whole digital life around this laptop, install all your software, configure all your shortcuts etc. Then one morning I'd just show up and say, either you're paying my $$ every month from now until you die or I'll make it so that the left mouse button/half the RAM/the right screen half don't work anymore. You'd be just the tiniest bit pissed about that, wouldn't you? Sure, I'd claim that there was a file in C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\giftconditions-eula.txt that said I could do that anytime, too bad you didn't read it. But because while it looked like I was being generous, my goal was to trap you and then force you into a situation where it's ostensibly easier to just give me some money every month than to switch your whole life back to another system and build everything again from scratch. Additionally, even if you agreed to pay me, I'd now hide a few rootkits and trackers on the device, cause what are you gonna do? Sure, I might say, feel free to copy all your files to a USB stick and use them elsewhere (GDPR) but come on...
Yeah okay it's not the same. But can we agree that LastPass's behavior is a great example of how to make people angry at you?
How did they disrespect their users? They even offer CSV export. Perhaps you can offer an alternative way doing it, I'm genuinely interested.
It's expensive to develop, maintain, improve a service that works across devices, operating systems, and browsers. But more importantly, _someone_ has to pay for CPU, RAM and bandwidth. Would you rather that someone be yourself or (eventually) advertisers.
Note that the listed trackers are not really trackers but analytics tools.
Also, you seem to be offering a false choice here, if I may say so respectfully. The way I understand it, the choice is not between Pro and Free with ads. The choice is between Free with highly invasive data mining trackers and Pro with highly invasive data mining trackers.
As for the trackers being analytical tools, well, a distinction without a (significant) difference in this case. I responded to that above. You could easily make a case that these trackers are worse than the addition of a random, not overly invasive ad network.
At this point, if I could advise LastPass, I'd just totally backtrack, apologize deeply, commit to keeping the free tier for the foreseeable future, remove all but one of the trackers, commit to a total privacy-centric policy ("The password safe users will always be able to trust") and take that time to build a convincing value proposition for anyone who pays for Slack, Teams and WinRAR (i.e. professional users and enterprises), not a student or someone's grandma who will now have to pay up or be tracked and have only half the functionality it relied on for years... I'm frankly convinced that (not overnight but in the long-term), revenue will be much higher and more stable. LastPass could still be the first (or second, after uBlock Origin) browser plugin everyone installs on a new system. But next quarter might be a blood-bath compared to the projections their private equity friends did in expectation of finally getting to sell all that preciousss user data. ;-)
One who set an expectation ought not be shocked when one's users have that expectation.
I don't think they are evil, but I do think they handled this transition poorly and with messaging that clearly didn't win their users over to their side.
Also, tracking is bad. I wouldn't do business with them on that basis.
I think they've lost focus of that now, their incentives have shifted (maximum cash extraction) and they're also tone-deaf. You just can't add 7 trackers to such a product without losing credibility.
Look, nowadays, some telemetry feedback (aka. trackers) is extremely valuable to iterate quickly and improve your software, also to the benefit of the end-user. What you certainly don't need is seven (7) trackers or to make them compulsory instead of opt-in or at least opt-out. I mean, the amount of "non-evil" stuff you could learn with a tracker in a password manager is certainly so limited that it doesn't justify 7 trackers. Anything above one self-hosted, non-third-party, non-adware telemetry server does seem slightly... evil in this context. ;-)
And if you add 7 trackers AND try to trick me with bait & switch tactics, well then, indeed, you're gonna lose a lot of business. Hope the bit of extra cash they got from people who panicked and didn't have time to set up alternatives was worth it...