The free tier is generous enough that essentially no honest user will pay, and the paid tier is priced at a few dollars a month. That is deliberate, and it is not a growth tactic to be reversed later.
The reasoning: our success metric for this phase is retained usage, and every dollar of price is a direct tax on the metric we are trying to move. A pricing page that converts 2% of signups and deters 20% of them is a bad trade when the thing you need is the twenty.
So price is doing a different job — it exists so that the cost of abusing the service is not zero. A wall nobody honest ever touches, that a bulk abuser hits immediately, is a filter, and filters should be set where the honest distribution ends, not where a revenue model wants them.
The alternative we rejected: a conventional tiered plan with a meaningful free/paid boundary. It would produce revenue now and would have made every subsequent decision on this page worse, because once a limit is load-bearing for revenue it stops being adjustable on the merits.