The free version doesn't allow GPU accelerated playback or editing or rendering which is a must for any serious user / business.
They get people in the door with a really powerful free editing software, and once you've invested time into learning it and made it part of your workflow, you want to pay the £300 to upgrade because it's too much hassle to learn a new editor, and Resolve is awesome, but you reallly don't want to keep waiting 3hrs to generate 1/8th res optimized media for your whole project before you can preview at more than 10fps on an i7 Extreme Edition (that's how they got me, if you couldn't tell).
It's an effective free -> paid product-led conversion path to acquire customers. Being on HN and presumably working in tech/SaaS, this is a familiar and effective business strategy.
They get people in the door with a really powerful free editing software, and once you've invested time into learning it and made it part of your workflow, you want to pay the £300 to upgrade because it's too much hassle to learn a new editor, and Resolve is awesome, but you reallly don't want to keep waiting 3hrs to generate 1/8th res optimized media for your whole project before you can preview at more than 10fps on an i7 Extreme Edition (that's how they got me, if you couldn't tell).
It's an effective free -> paid product-led conversion path to acquire customers. Being on HN and presumably working in tech/SaaS, this is a familiar and effective business strategy.