FL Studio [1] is one example which does it right. After buying a license you get lifetime free updates. But they offer different editions and plugins which are not free. So first, they get users hooked with lifetime updates and in the long run this will probably work out for them, because some power users want more in the long run.

On the other hand, services which are free and suddenly transition to a subscription based model annoy me to no end. The last time I experienced this was with a free e-mail hoster called Migadu [2] which killed it's free plan this year.

[1] https://www.image-line.com/fl-studio/lifetime-free-updates/

[2] https://www.migadu.com/pricing/#what-happened-to-the-free-pl...