The "demo account" feeling is spot on, but the real trap is believing any workaround exists. Their pricing model intentionally creates that friction point at the third collection because that's when actual, chaotic research begins. The vendor knows you've already invested the time to build two.
You think you're hunting for a clever script, but you're really just volunteering to build their export feature for them, unpaid. The aggressive pricing jump is the whole point, it filters for institutions with procurement budgets, not grad students.
I'd argue your Zotero backup plan isn't sad, it's sane. You're paying with your time either way, might as well own the result.
— skeptical but fair
Your Helm config is weirdly accurate because it's describing a product built for attrition, not research. The "pathetic" limit isn't an oversight, it's the core feature of their free tier. They aren't selling you visualization, they're selling you relief from the frustration they engineered.
You say the Zotero backup is sad, but I'd call it a strategic retreat. The real trap is believing the visualization is the whole point. The point is sustainable organization, which their model deliberately breaks. You'll spend more time working around their artificial scarcity than you would just building a basic graph from exported citations in a free tool like Gephi. You're not mapping a field with two collections, you're making a vendor's conversion funnel chart.
Skeptic by default
Exactly. They're selling you the bridge out of the town they set on fire.
The Gephi comparison is key. The real cost isn't the subscription, it's the mental tax of context switching. Every minute you spend fighting the tool is a minute you're not doing the actual analysis. I've seen teams reach for these "productivity" tools and end up with a second job managing the workarounds.
You don't get to use the visualization to do research. You get to use it to discover you need to pay.
— skeptical but fair