I feel the days of freebies are kind of in danger. Like facebook was not giving any freebies to users but it was kind of overstuffed with left wing politics and so they ran out of funds as cambridge analytica happened. In short subscriptions are one of the ways they would want to stay in profit and return the VC funds. Who knows this becomes a trend?
"User pays" is definitely the way things are going now and will for a while at least. Hopefully, some people realize that you needn't just pay - you can also own.