This is really a poor decision and even more poorly communicated... a simple blog post, no direct message to the QDS users.
I have been using Qlik product for more than 10 years and I love them (hence why I am so vocal about this). I am all in favour of Qlik trying to earn more money especially if that helps speed up development , but this is like pulling the carpet under the users/customers feet. Furthermore without any rational explanation.
In most products like QlikSense you always have one size of the platform subsidizing the other. Viewing PDFs is free, but you pay for the PDF creator. Tableau Desktop is paid, but you get a free Tableau Viewer. None of this "free" option has prevented these companies from being successful, quite the contrary it's part of the platform strategy to solve the chicken-egg problem.
Qlik had made a very clear decision: free to create, paid to share on a server. Absolutely sound decision as the ratio of developers vs viewers is largely in favour of the viewers.
By making the QDS paid, this will limit the amount of people creating apps, and if you reduce the amount of people creating apps, where is the demand for buying viewers licenses going to come from?
Now that QSD is maturing, I don't have any problem to see more friction, but not like this. They could limit the amount of free apps (e.g. max of 5) on QSD and then push harder to upgrade etc etc, but removing the free option altogether is a major blow to users and a major mistake.
I have always been able to drive Qlik adoption by training more Qlik developers and having them create apps which in turn would generate demand from viewers.
From the outside, this move looks more like a financial driven decision and certainly not product driven one. And when finance takes decision for products, it normally doesn't end well.
