They had a free “starter” plan, which began to charge you their pretty hefty traffic prices if you ever happened to cross the free limit, leading to situations like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39520776

Which probably wasn’t very good PR for them either (see the classic HN CEO response). I’m happy about this new, actually free plan, I wanted to move all my projects off Netlify when that happened but now I feel a bit more safe.

Be aware you have to explicitly switch to that in your account settings, otherwise you remain on “starter” which starts to bill you.

Same. I'm confused by this. Maybe they are changing (decreasing?) what's included in the free tier and rebranding. Will look into it.

You don't need to have a credit card on file to use this free plan apparently

I think they are now allowing serverless and edge functions in the free plan. Previously it was only site builds and static hosting. They're also allowing 100 form submissions.