What is the reason behind not allowing capturing real email address on the free plan?

[Darren_Murphy]

Here is where the original announcement was made:

Email Anonymization

Glide can now generate virtual email addresses for users of your app—users sign in normally, and developers never see their real email. This protects user privacy and minimizes the sharing of personal info. [El8aXNhU4AEvQOP] This won’t affect existing user emails but will create an anonymous email for any new users that sign up. [Screen Shot 2020-11-04 at 11.34 1]

and here is the announcement that was made when it was made the default (you’ll find the answer to your specific question in this thread):

Important Change: Hide User Emails is now default

Email Anonymization / Hide User Emails is now on by default for new apps, and you must choose to collect real user emails if you want them. There’s a bug where this setting may change if you open an existing app in the editor and you have never set the setting before. We are rolling out a fix to prevent this setting from changing when editing existing apps.

You’re not the first one to wonder about this, and there have been several related topics/discussion threads since the feature was introduced. Search the forum for “anonymization” and you’ll get dozens of hits.