We've been around for about a decade. IBM watson used us as their social data provider during Jeopardy. We provide data to tons of companies and you're probably using our services - just that it's not obvious where we're used since it's SaaS B2B and not B2C.
We're not free but the primary reason we exist is that other vendors charge borderline extortionate pricing and I fundamentally believe that the web MUST remain open.
We've also been providing data for very affordable pricing to researchers for more than a decade.
Search for us as Spinn3r under Google Scholar (our previous name) and we have hundreds and hundreds of PhDs who have access to our data.
We do charge for research usage now but it's very very very affordable.
The entire point is that we're trying to enable innovation.