Free offerings are a marketing expense via extended trial run. It is more productive for society to give away limited product offerings at little marginal cost than to put the equivalent into more advertising, salespeople, and influencer campaigns.

If I want to find out which git hosting to use, it would be great to try out Gitlab, GitHub, and Bitbucket first (and everyone else try them) so we could assess genuine product usefulness as a group rather than rely on Twitter ads or astroturfing here (no bearing on product)