Hi,
For almost ten years, a free version of the reports were available but two things happened to eventually have to go paid only.
First, our costs have gone up in every direction so offering the service for free is no longer sustainable. We are constantly maintaining, updating, and developing and offering the service at no cost is simply not possible anymore.
However, we do our best to make it very low cost. If $5.95 saves you even one hour of troubleshooting in one month, it's been paid for.
Second, we had a large base of free members but 99% of those members never interacted with us no matter how much we tried to get input and feedback.
Not getting any feedback makes it hard to improve, fix problems, and more importantly, hard to know what we should focus on and put more effort into.
Free services are often abused and are mostly offered by companies that have big investors behind them, willing to lose money to gain a user base. We don't have investors, we're a small company wanting to earn our keep by offering good services that people find useful.
I hope this helps to answer your question, and we hope you'll find OutagesIO useful too.