That's like saying Youtube isn't free because there's a subscription...

It’s like saying just because there’s a free offering the product isn’t free. Anyone who has ever built a shareware or demoware product understand the free offering is a funnel to the paid offering and doesn’t exist as an independent part but as an advertisement for the paid product.

Yes, but still a free product. Unless you say that in the future the product won't have a free offering anymore, it's a free product.

That’s literally not how people in the business of creating product strategies classify things.

Yes, it is? Usually, products with free offering + subscriptions get classified as "freemium".

No it isn’t. Free tier of YouTube make money from ads. Free tier of ChatGPT is just a funnel for the paid tier. It’s a marketing cost.

Don't you think they will put ads on ChatGPT?

There are several ways to monetize a product (they already make some use of it).