I think it's more about miscommunication than money.

These licenses are just donations, so the announcement should be framed around supporting Immich voluntarily. Instead, they give 4 paragraphs of corporate speak and 2 license tiers, which signals the complete opposite of voluntary support.

There will always be stingy users who complain about paying for indie software. But this announcement confused even the supporters who were happy to donate to Immich in the past.

I wonder how much of this weird monetization is caused by the FUTO acquisition. And I doubt they'll reach their funding goals from individual payments anyways. I think the main money in open-source comes from corporate sponsorships and involvement, right? And didn't the core Immich team join FUTO in order to receive full-time salaries?

Just a really confusing situation for users.

This is a ridiculous statement. The backlash isn't over spending money to support open source software, which is obvious from reading the comments on the announcement. The backlash is about an open source project using the AGPL 3 license (right there in the project repository in the LICENSE file) is "selling licenses to use the software" while making vague promises that "nothing will be paywalled".

Yes, you can sell open source software but the way they're going about it is incredibly tone deaf and brings up real worry they'll change the license in the future, maybe making it not truly open source. Even if this isn't the case the communication is really terrible. Why should we trust them when they're already this ham-handed?