I have been following with interest the development of Spanning Sync's Google Calendar <-> iCal syncing software.
But after 7 months of hard work, the development team gave the finger to 18,862 beta testers couple days ago, by launching the final v1.0 with a very steep pricing scheme that resulted in more than 90% of angry comments on their blog post announcing the launch.

Most of the discontent stems from the fact that the team opted to charge per year what most people would have paid as a one-off fee, and opted to charge as a one-off fee what most people would almost have to pay for a full-fledged software suite like iLife, and that for what angry commentors call "a little syncing script for calendars"... Needless to say, they didn't see appropriate to offer a discount to any of said 18,862 testers (to further undermine purchases from their most likely buyers)!!
Moreover, with Google and Apple strengthening their collaboration on (as of now still secret) projects, could we expect to see this syncing feature built-in the next version of OSX.
For more crusty bits, please flip through the comments. It seems there's already another script out there that does the same thing, for free: GCALDaemon!

At the end of the day, it feels as though the developers rushed it out of the door to make a quick buck before OSX new version comes out in couple months.
Now the question that tickles me is whether they will make as much selling it 60$ to fewer people or selling it 10$ to more...