Personally, I find that having orchestrate and regularly schedule the exporting of that file off my device to somewhere else, and then look after it there to be not "free".

The new offering is reasonably priced imo.

Agreed. I prefer setting it up myself and have had Signal backing up to my home server for a few years now, but for most users an opt-in with a basic free tier and cheap enough paid plan makes a lot of sense.

Glad to see they're finding potential revenue streams that don't compromise their focus on privacy and security.