The Great Tech Shake-Down

You will pay for security, or bad things might happen

There’s a special kind of irony when software makers decide to add charges for …, checks notes, fixing their own software bugs. The common practice of fixing your own mistake, seems to morph into a paid privilege.

Remember hotpatching? The seamless method of updating Windows without rebooting, quietly added to Azure-based Windows Server editions with little fanfare? Well, Microsoft has finally decided that if businesses want to avoid downtime, they’d better start budgeting for yet another subscription service.

Starting July 2025, hotpatching will cost $1.50 per core per month, delivering eight hotpatches per year. But, and here’s the kicker, baseline months will still require a reboot. That means every January, April, July, and October, you still have to deal with downtime regardless. In essence, Microsoft will charge you for an umbrella that only works on sunny days.

Source:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/28/windows_server_2025_hotpatching_subscription/

Of course Microsoft justifies this with Security and convenience. But let’s get real, this isn’t about protecting businesses from vulnerabilities. It’s about adding a new revenue stream for something that was Microsoft’s responsibility to start with.

Meanwhile, over in storage land, Synology has decided that the way forward is to lock in customers into its ecosystem. During the announcement of the newer 2025 models, Synology confirmed that the Plus-series NAS devices, require Synology branded hard drives for full compatibility.

Source:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/synology-confirms-need-for-synology-branded-drives-in-newer-plus-series-nas/

For those unfamiliar with this kind of practices, Synology does not manufacture its own drives, instead, it rebrands models from Toshiba and Seagate, and then sells them at a premium.

Customers that buy the new models and try to install third-party drives, even Seagate and Toshiba, may find themselves locked out of key features, like storage pool creation, volume-wide deduplication, and drive health analytics. You know, features that no one needs in a NAS.

Although Synology promised to introduce a curated compatibility list in time, this will surelly slow adoption, and create just enough friction to push customers toward buying Synology-branded drives instead, or give up on the brand altogether.

These moves aren’t all that surprising. These are part of a larger trend where tech companies redefine standard functionality as "premium." First, they introduce a feature. Next, they limit its accessibility, usually under the guise of security, reliability, or seamless experience. Finally, they slap a price tag on it, forcing users to either pay up or go without.

The worst part is that it works, or has been working so far. Businesses will pay Microsoft’s hotpatching fee because downtime is expensive and/or painful. NAS owners will fork over extra cash for Synology-branded drives because storage security matters. Companies know they have the leverage, and they exploit it, you know like the Mafia used to do, or still does. I’m not very well versed in Mafia.

If we follow this logic, it’s only a matter of time before someone starts charging for basic hardware functionality. Perhaps laptop manufacturers will introduce "premium cooling plans", where fans only activate with a subscription. Or maybe hard drives will require monthly unlock keys, letting you access your own data only if you've paid this month’s fee, like corporate organized ransomware. It’s not like we haven’t seen this happen with some cloud products. Yes, I’m looking at you Adobe.

So, the real question is: how long and how far will companies go until customers start really making other choices.

Hotpatching can be made less of an issue with some redundancy and a bit of extra work. And in case someone from Synology is reading this, open-source NAS operating systems and custom NAS hardware are becoming quite popular.

What do you think? Will businesses actually pay up or look for alternatives?

Do you have any examples of formerly free features becoming paid?