Speaking from the other side (as a maker), sometimes it's not that trivial to provide public access, and requiring sign up is a good deterrent against high traf

Speaking from the other side (as a maker), sometimes it's not that trivial to provide public access, and requiring sign up is a good deterrent against high traffic that has low value (curious folks). The thing is, some products require something "expensive" to run (mine for example uses Chrome, which is a significant bottleneck in capacity). I know some large projects had to close or add a paywall for this same reason (AI Dungeon comes to mind).