I can understand why you're upset, but I can also understand Flickr's point of view: the "they" who decided it was going to be free for all time was Yahoo!, and they were by and large pretty terrible stewards of the service. And it's hard not to think that the stereotypically Silicon Valley "give it away for free and hope you find a way to monetize down the road" attitude is part of what nearly killed Flickr under their management. The "they" who own it now is SmugMug, and I don't think they can be blamed for deciding that the only practical way to monetize Flickr is to, well, charge for the service.

Personally, in most cases I'd much rather pay directly for a service than get it for free from a company whose business model is "try and monetize it through advertising, mining user data and/or dark patterns and shut it down if all of those fail."