After they bought µTorrent they started bundling tons of adware, including, most recently, a bitcoin miner. Sync started out as a pretty cool decentralized self-hosted dropbox replacement that was incredibly easy to use. After promising the free version would never be limited they did a 180 and limited it to 10 shares when they launched a commercial version and ruined usability with a bunch of access controls and user accounts.
Obviously they have to make money somehow and it's perfectly within their rights to do so but they've shown that their business model has been to offer a product for free and then, once they suck people in, break promises and use underhanded ways to monetize.
Knowing maelstrom is likely to end up filled with ads or under an overpriced subscription model once it's done killed any interest I might have had in the product.