The title editorialises needlessly, and incorrectly. The API remains free for up to 10,000 queries a day. That is more than all the traffic the techcrunch network makes, so it remains free for most everyone.
The change would affect significantly somebody who uses API as a part of their primary function of the site [1], for example for some search mashup (like various Cuil parodies or DuckDuckGo). For these, basically each page view could be one (or more) API requests.