They have both paid and free products. In a zero marginal cost world, this is a legit business model, where you offer a limited free product and then pay for the full version, say with support and more functionality, similar to what many other vendors do. In the security space, for example, Burp suite provides a "community", "professional", and "enterprise" version.
So I disagree that "free" means "collects all your mouse clicks and sells them off to the highest bidder".
Seems to me like basic financial physics. No one is saying it's moral, or that we should put up with it - but if a for-profit company is paying a bunch of employees to provide a free service to you, you'd have to be dumb not to be curious about their business model.
I get it. But to be fair, there are many for-profit companies that offer lower tiers of their products for free (or even opensource), no (or little) strings attached. So it is certainly not the norm.
Whelp, at least from a business case I know, it goes like: "Hey, you get our basic tier for free, but please, let us send you a newsletter occasionally. You don't like that? That's fine, you'll find a unsubscribe link in every newsletter."
So the business case doesn't sell the data (that's screaming for trouble), but rather uses it for their own ads.
So I disagree that "free" means "collects all your mouse clicks and sells them off to the highest bidder".