I heard that Pyronix were free, but are now looking at charging.
Risco are not using their own cloud either, so they are actually paying a third party.
The only way they can charge is by charging the installer, with the hundreds of thousands of connections they have its too difficult for them to manage the connections so the installer needs to do that. Then to invoice the individual customer would also be quite tricky, cutting the wrong people off ect.
HKC have over 400,000 connections now, they are on their own approved cloud (so are able to grade the monitoring), and they have charged since day one. IMO the HKC app is the better looking of the apps, it works better with the CCTV than the Risco one too. I like the Risco one but it was very unreliable at first, and the panels are just not as good as they used to be.