Free services are the internet standard. Everyone is used to getting things for free and no one wants to pay. Yet we are ignoring the hidden costs. Empowering spam. Entrenching monopolies based on being the platform that has captured users, mines their data, sells us out to advertisers. Free is a great alternative to expensive - but shoddy free is a terrible alternative to better-but-cheap.
Why does it seem the only two options are free and expensive? The lack of an effective micropayment system. Cheap means not pricing in dollars or even cents. But in fractions of a cent. And this is an area where transitional finance cannot compete with cryptocurrency. Traditional scale & necessary costs mean dollars & cents, or credit cards and bank accounts will never have a play in micropayments. And where expensive cryptocurrency ecosystems have already priced themselves out of the running.
The solution is still in need of development. Working on a structure . . .
Cheap - aggregated but painless - can deliver more than free or freemium.