> I do wonder how many of their users pay and whether that covers the free users.

It doesn’t cover the free users, but that’s normal startup strategy. They are using investor cash to grow as quickly as possible. This involves providing as much free service as they can afford so that some of those free users convert to paid customers. At any point they can decide not to give so much free service away to rebalance in favour of profitability over growth. The cost of inference is plummeting, so it’s getting cheaper to service those free users all the time.

> It’s like those extremely cheap food and grocery delivery apps, they made their food cheap, no delivery fees for a while… […] they started to run out of VC money, they had to raise prices

That’s not the same situation because that makes the product more expensive for the customers, which will hit sales. This isn’t the same as cutting back on a free tier, because in that situation you’re not doing anything to harm your customers’ service.