lud
Official featured changes with fancy graphics: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/4-0/
They did do donations but maybe it wasn’t enough 🤷 https://blog.opensubtitles.com/opensubtitles/thank-you-for-donations
It wouldn’t surprise me if “VIP” was originally a tier given for donations which had some benefits.
Edit: that’s indeed the case https://blog.opensubtitles.com/opensubtitles/free-vip-membership-for-first-20-users
It sucks, sure. But it’s been free for a really long time, and it costs money to run a service.
You can’t really expect that a service will serve an increasing amount of people free stuff forever.
At least making people visit the site will encourage them to upload and help keep the service up.
Btw, it’s not expensive and if you think it is. Just use some other service.