At sufficient scale anything free ceases to be so and anything cheap starts to get expensive. This certainly applies to bandwidth. I assume either the free tier was starting to get significantly expensive or it was simply so large that the potential ad revenue was too large a carrot to ignore. I can't say which.

But I feel like Zoom is missing an opportunity here. I just went through the exercise of googling "zoom pricing" and... I'm confused. I still don't know how much it costs.

Twitch can largely be credited with the model of supporting creators with monthly subscriptions. Obviously they didn't invent the monthly subscription but they made it "mainstream" (within the context of Twitch viewers) such that many creators can support themselves this way with audience sizes that aren't large enough to be supported by ad revenue.

The point is that Twitch created a user behaviour of supporting creators with sufficient scale to matter.

So with Zoom, the pricing should be transparent and obvious. Obviously you're going to have the company plans that cover all participants. It probably shouldn't be "unlimited" as those are your most valuable customers and the most willing to pay.

But the missed opportunity here is to incentivize individuals to pay with features that might matter to them. I'm not sure what those are but in the very least, paid users should receive no ads. Make this $5/month. Lots of people will pay that if you toss in a few premium features.

Ad-supporting free services is so pervasive because it's effective but it's also lazy. With the rise of remote work, there are a lot of people who will gladly pay some small monthly fee to make their life easier even if their employer won't. Build user behaviour.