I wasn’t offended by the email but ever since Delicious Brains acquired it I’ve been using fewer ACF features whenever possible, on the chance that they’ll stab the Lifetimers in the back someday and I’ll have to switch back to CMB2 or something. I’m all for supporting creators but lifetime licenses are offered for a reason — ACF is one of the most popular plugins in the world and it probably owes a lot of that success to the bulk influx of cash and adoption that they initially provided. Development costs cannot possibly be the issue for a plugin this big, so if they’re hating on the Lifetimers for using too much support, then first off they may want to focus on why people are having so many problems in the first place to reduce support requests across the board, and then if they’re still desperately overwhelmed perhaps offer some kind of priority support for a nominal fee. But any plugin that offers a free version in the WP repo, which is probably the real support bottleneck if there is one, should not be begging Lifetimers to start paying. Rather they should probably focus on increasing the value of the Pro version to try and convince free users to upgrade.