From an non-financial perspective, presumably they are useful for testing the service? Adding experimental features, seeing how they react, not having to worry

From an non-financial perspective, presumably they are useful for testing the service? Adding experimental features, seeing how they react, not having to worry about up time on their servers. Understanding how the service scales, in case you get any enterprise-style customers. Learning what sort of features are missing etc. Essentially a loss leader to improve the service.