I guess the issue I run into is that the line between the pay (“freelancer”) and free versions of Pulse were a bit too blurred for my taste and having apparently stepped over that line (I swear I have no recollection of signing up for Freelancer, which is not to say I did not) – I found no way of coming back.
Exactly what we will be fixing in the 2.4 release of Pulse (Feb — this also fixes the /dropins issue), everything that is “Freelance” now is all free, the only thing that costs money are team-sharing features. So if you want to manage all your eclipse configurations, workspace settings, projects, branches, etc. all using Pulse you can, for free, and from MyEclipse 7.x. It’s just when you want to take that configuration you have decked out and shared it out to a team that you get into the pay stuff of Pulse.
I did not know what “freelancer” features I was using or how to downgrade, so my options are to pay up (again — since I already paid for MyEclipse) or reinstall it all and hope it works…
This was a failure on our part making that flow clear and protecting ME users from it. In MyEclipse 7.0 even when you use Freelance features, it will never expire. With this upcoming update we are just removing all that and making it free.