Expiring licenses, arbitrary limits, crippled functionality, troubles with moving software between computers, publishers going under... this, much more than money, is why I stick to free software as much as possible.
The problem extends beyond software. I had a home weather station from LaCrosse Technology that was supposed to provide internet-connected forecasts and alerts for a lifetime.
It turns out LaCrosse didn't mean my lifetime, or the lifetime of the device, but more like the lifetime of a carnival goldfish.
A license expires and I am at the sellers mercy whether I am allowed to get it extended. If it were libre I could instead find someone else to give my money to and keep using it.
I want to use my software for something else. Again, I can try offering the company money to allow me to, but if they say no I am out of luck. Instead I can pay whoever I like to implement the necessary changes for me.
Crippled functionality. Again, I can pay someone else to uncripple it and the original manufacturer has to compete with the uncrippled version.
Moving software. That is admittedly only about licensing and kinda unrelated, but similar to the first one.
It is nice that libre software often also is gratis but that is just a nice bonus.
Even if you have a perpetual license valid on any computer, it may still be impossible to move the license/software to different hardware, if you legally can't debug/reverse engineer it and pay someone to fix the incompatibility.
This is not isolated and there are ways of making it work.
If software is free, someone still has to sacrifice to keep it up to date. If you're not paying money for it, publishers will get money in other ways like advertisements, or selling your data.
Most apps cost less than the price of a single meal.
People that see value in something but refuse to pay even the tiniest amounts will always be a cultural amazement to me.
It's a frequent source of confusion, which is why some people prefer other terms like libre software or FLOSS (free/libre open-source software).