Obviously we all want to avoid enshittified (aggressively monetized) software or at least get our money’s worth. I’m looking at self-hosting software right now and one I’m looking has a pricing page but only for cloud (no other paywalled features) and is open source. I tried looking up future plans and didn’t find much, so it doesn’t seem like it will enshittify. (not related) I had thought about switching to Omnivore for a long time but then they merged with ElevenLabs and the rest is history.
I don’t think you can. But if it’s open source and popular, there might be a chance it will have a maintained fork should that happen.
Freemium feature creep might be a sign things are changing for the worst, as in, if more and more features are being added to the premium plan and the free version is stagnating; to the point the target public of the premium version is creeping to average users instead of aiming at commercial or power users.