The pattern repeats itself. Come, use our services, it's free, it will be good for you. Users elevate the service to a monopoly. And then the behemoth thinks that the users - who gave their blood so the behemoth could grow - are now more like a nuisance and kills those that are the most vulnerable.

Every year they put the threshold higher and it results in more and more people getting burned. Of course the big, established brands are protected.

So they don't want the average joe's opinion. And they don't want to funnel money to you, now that you have fulfilled your purpose.

What you describe is more like the traditional VC structure for most businesses. Provide low cost services while they need to grow user base -- as user base is established the model now needs to extract value from the users - quality drops and the costs increases.

It happens for all VC based products since the drive on returns of invested capital is so high.

Put another way -- early stage products that every uses and love (in most not all cases) should not be assumed to be the end product.