The Dune team has provided millions of queries to the community for years for free, something no other platform has done. I honestly don't think we would be at the level of transparency we are in the space today without their work, many of the top data platforms you see today (blockworks, artemis, allium, etc) were bootstrapped off of their public queries/tables and the wizard community. They're just a very humble team so they won't publicly take credit for any of that.
I truly respect the team for continuing to make really hard decisions while shipping a better product. And its still insane value on the paid plans, I guarantee you will not get access to this quality of data and query engine for less than $500 on any other provider out there (will be in the multiple thousands of dollars) 😁
A lot of the community has been placed into roles at institutions like Stripe, Fidelity, S&P, etc too which have the money to pay - so the subsidies are mostly unnecessary now.