Yeah, they onboarded A LOT of folks with that original pricing and quality. It was "good enough" for most use-cases, like many, I work in existing code-bases and do a lot of "multi-file" edits, that aren't hard to do technically, just take a lot of time and must be done precisely enough. For that, it was perfect.
I wonder how many people will stay, there's still a huge void in alternatives on that original pricing.
But people get used to higher prices. Or they churn out.
For hobby projects there can be local or free models. There are also some caching techniques.