I could imagine node-as-a-service providers offering a free tier with limited capacity (like AWS) or low cost plan for low volume usage.
Likewise some services (anything requiring the follower and/or tags plugins) cost a lot more than others and would have to be priced higher.
All of this can get worked out if we have a sensible and sustainable market.
Agreed, still waiting to hear from anyone willing to pay for such a service, no takers so far. Maybe a community blacklist showing bots and apps revenues and whether they use own rpc servers or not will start getting action.
Good idea we need something like Karma points high score free use low score pay more.
Anyone running these services should also be accepting brave payments as I'm sure many users have some free tokens to use.