Asklemmy

Just to add, the concept of a bait and switch, where you lure a party in with something and then swap it out once they are committed, is not a new idea in the slightest. This is just a modernized, refined tech version.

Uber and Lyft are good examples. Drive out most of the competition with an aggressive early phase where you spend most of your capital to shore up a massively negative balance sheet. You are baiting the customers to you with very low prices.

Then once the competition is eliminated, you raise your prices on the captive consumers that rely on the service to recoup your costs and start making money.

If you, in a video game, have ever lured something in with ranged attacks and then switched to melee to kill it, by plan, you executed this same strategy.

Every single discounted trial period for a subscription is employing a riff on the same concept, where they hope you're too lazy to cancel.

Fools been falling for the bait and switch since ... oh dawn of civilization maybe? Awareness of it defeats it, people don't take bait when they know it's bait. It is not complicated though, and does not require complex understanding to grasp.