At the startup I used to work at the MD spent quite a bit of time dodging calls from Cloudinary. Every few months we needed to be on a higher tier package. We'd generally be tasked with optimising whichever metric was causing the problem a coupe of times a year (deleting / consolidating versions of various images etc).
It felt pretty shady (both his behaviour and their pricing structures).
Price increases due to inflation are a necessity.
I can't see a world where I would buy a software once and use it forever, so paying for upgrades is necessary at some point.