Developer discovers his note app's paywall silently deleted users' work for months

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A browser extension developer found that his app's free-plan character limit was silently blocking autosave, causing users' notes to stop updating once they exceeded 500 characters. The bug had been live for months, and users who wrote long notes during the 7-day free trial found those notes permanently uneditable after the trial expired. The root cause was a 'return' statement that halted the save function before writing to the database, with no crash or error logged. An investigation revealed the test suite had always run with 'proUnlocked: true', meaning no test had ever simulated a free-plan user. After discovering the issue while reviewing paywall code for low conversion rates, the developer removed the character cap entirely and corrected other free-plan inconsistencies, including a note count that did not match the store listing.

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