There's a certain transparency lacking.
It's fine to say "It's free for now, and will be $0.50 per month once mature" or "We plan to make it free for open images and charge $5,000 for proprietary use" or whatever. Or "We'll support it by doing machine learning to find naked images and pay for it by hosing a porn web site." Or "I'm developing this until I can sell it to the highest bidder."
But there needs to be some answer as to what the goal or business model is.