Just a note: if you go from free to paid, you can recover those lost messages. They're never actually deleted, you just can't view messages after the 10k limit in the free version.
> Are the bandwidth costs really that high to justify hiding all those messages (likely on the order of 100k or 1M for many servers) ?
Given that the cost to you is 0, what cost to them is required for it to be justified to you?
It seems odd that providing a free but limited service is evil, based only on it being slightly more expensive to give you an even better service for free.
Ok, well the alternative is no free version. Yeesh, people are so entitled. They're trying to give you a mostly full featured version of their software in hopes that you'll pay them someday.