Nope, I purchased “Reddit Sync” years before the redesign (which was not actually the first redesign) and the author did not introduce any new fees or make the improved interface a separate app that required purchasing or anything. Every once in a while major updates would come out at no additional cost. When the biggest update hit a small vocal subset of the community got upset because some people can’t stand change and harassed lj. Sync is only even the price it is because when the original ~$5 ad removal fee was floated on discord during the lemmy rewrite the community voiced that they would be willing to pay more since many of us felt we got more than we paid for out of the reddit version.