Christel Dahlskjaer, the former head of Freenode's staff who transferred her interest in Freenode Limited to Lee, resigned in March. Dahlskjaer, with the help of Richard “RichiH” Hartmann, took over Freenode after project originator Rob Levin (lilo) died in a traffic accident in 2006 and Levin’s brother tried to turn the project into business. She was an employee of PIA at the time of the Freenode Limited transaction.
What did Christel Dahlskjaer do next?
https://www.indexoncensorship.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04...
Handing it over to another public ad-blocking DNS resolver might be reasonable, but I think it's more honest to disable to service to let users know (in spectacularly failing way, true) that this particular service is going offline (basically, don't transfer the data to a service these customers have not signed up for).
Since it's DNS, they could also just resolve everything to their own homepage saying the service is dead, but that would still break a bunch of non-web-browser apps.
The creator started the project 5 years ago because people around him without technical ability wanted a DNS ad blocker, but didn't know how to setup pi-hole. His peak MRR through Patreon was 13$, and he received one or two separate donations of ~10$ every month as well. The servers alone cost him more money than he received.
Dutch source: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/191950/openbare-pi-hole-adhole-v...