Those free Lemmy apps cost time and effort to create and maintain; if people want to give their stuff away for free, that's their business. In any case, I tried those other apps, and I didn't like them (likely because they've put hobbyist levels of effort into them rather than a paid-worker's amount). And because they're free, I would never dream of asking for more features (which is tantamount to saying, "Yo, dev. Give me more free shit!").

Besides, we're talking about a few dollars to support a single dev. Not like Ruben has teams of people working for him in some faceless megacorp making billions of dollars.

Boost has the features I like with the layout I like, and I paid a few dollars mainly as a tip to the dev, which just happens to come with the added benefit of no ads.