Why is "free" the most misleading word in social media tools?

I've been comparing the free tiers of social media schedulers and the word "free" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Most free plans fall into one of two traps. Either they cap your scheduling volume so low it's unusable past week one (10 posts, 20 posts/month), or they let you schedule but lock the thing you actually need behind a paywall: analytics, more than one or two channels, or AI features that run out after a few credits.

It made me realize "free tier" and "free trial" have basically merged. A lot of free plans are just trials with no end date, designed to frustrate you into upgrading rather than to be genuinely useful.

The version that feels more honest to me: let people manually create, schedule, and publish to a few channels for free, indefinitely, and only charge for the expensive part (AI generation). The scheduler itself shouldn't be the paywall.

I wrote up the full free-vs-paid breakdown across the main tools here, if it's useful for anyone evaluating options:

https://xreplyai.com/blog/free-social-media-scheduler?utm_source=producthunt&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=blog-2026-06-03

How do you all draw the line on what should be free vs. paid in your own products?