I agree and don't forget about utoons formerly known as manhwafreak 😂
so on the one hand, not gonna argue about utoons policies, they really shouldn't paywall shit. But I will say this about them.
They work hard and do good work.
I don't know if you were around for the comicdom incident that caused many legitimate scanlation groups to disband and left many series abandoned to this day, but the long and short of that incident was a scam artist by the name of comicdom gathered literally hundreds of translators together and essentially made a group that would translate hundred of chapters a day from hundreds of works. they did this at a speed that most other groups couldn't keep up with and at a quality that was on par if not better than some of the more amateur groups. so those groups disbanded thinking comicdom and their group was gonna just take over the scene.
and then it happened, comicdoms scam hit full force, soliciting thousands of dollars in "donations" to "help pay the translators". Threatening that they would need to abandon many of the works they themselves had sniped and were now abandoned by the previous longstanding groups. The translators continued working assuming they would be paid, but comicdom took the money and ran. An exact amount isn't known but its estimated to be several thousand dollars.
obviously the translators couldn't continue without any funds, so slowly hundreds of series were left abandoned and the communities trust in scanlation groups was broken for a while.
Every so often comicdom comes back to snipe a series under a different name but the community is quick to find him and call him out.
any way my point for this is that manwha freak (now utoon) is made up of many of those translators that comicdom screwed over, trying to put their skills to work and get paid while doing so. Is it wrong that they paywall? probably, its not ethical to paywall stuff you are technically illegally distributing. but they also rescued many series that languished in the purgatory that comicdom left them in.
Again i will not argue about their quality of scanlation, i agree that it is rough, but they have demonstrated that they are passionate about scanlation and are not in it purely for the money, and they will even do comissioned works and (i am speaking from experience here) will actually keep in touch with the person paying them to work on a series to keep them up to date on any potential delays or problems.
their work ethic is good. So please do not put them on the same level as people like comicdom and other scam sites like madara scans.