Web browsers are mostly free and don't try to upsell you to a Pro paid version. The MacWhisper author deserves to be compensated for their work, so I'm not objecting to the existence of a paid version. This feels like yet another relatively low value freemium/upsell wrapper in the Mac shareware ecosystem to me.

I'm probably wrong and there's a real population that benefits from this work, clearly some folks perceive it as useful enough to pay for it and I'm just not in that audience to see it.

I think part of what rubs me the wrong way about this is that it feels to me like commercial freeloading due to the thinness of the commercialized wrapper around a free/open core in this case (whisper model + code); it feels ethically questionable unless the author contributes back some portion of the proceeds to research in some way -- I didn't see evidence of that. I'm probably being naive here, happy to have a less snarky discussion about it though.