Every release they are slowly matching Beejive? Palringo is version 1.2.2, Beejive is 1.0.0. Palringo has had a lot more time to enhance their app and deliver what their customers want. From the beginning Beejive is a phenomenal app and will continue to get better. I think Palringo is great, their dev team is especially good for a free app, however, I think because it's free there's always going to be short-comings. I believe that because Beejive is earning quite substantial money from their app that they have the ability to develop something far better.
Beejive suits my needs better than Palringo so that's why I bought it. People that think that it should be cheaper are not the target audience, they are Palringo's. If a developer believes that their app should be a certain price I respect that and my decision on whether to buy it or not is based on that. Don't try and disrespect developer's by saying they should drop the price. You either buy it or you don't, if an app is really too expensive the people will respond by not buying it, this hasn't been the case with BeejiveIM.
You make a good point, however, it's only one opinion regarding how developers are driven. It's all speculation at this point how Palringo is driven but I haven't seen Palringo hold back on features because they are not being paid.
Perhaps the "speediness" of them developing something better may lag a bit but they have rolled out feature by feature what BeejiveIM has...a couple features behind but you have to ask yourself.
What happens when Palringo matches what BeejiveIM has? Do you still pay for an application that Palringo does exactly?
I'm not discrediting the cost of developers. For I have paid over $200 for applications (110 applications) already on my phone, I think the most I paid for any given app is around $40! Maybe it's my addiction but when something free is available and they say they have a "premium" version, I have always bought the premium version. I think it's definitely an addition!
This actually led me to this post because I was so tempted to buy BeejiveIM (because I have to have the best) but then when I actually put it on paper, Palringo versus BeejiveIM, I really don't need the offline capabilities at this time (for I don't need to be logged on 24/7), email messages, save messages, etc. features. If I did buy it, I would be left with another application I bought that yes, having all the features is there but rarely used....of course I would satisfy my addiction....