$10/year for 10,000 messages/year is 10 cents per message. (Or some other volume at 10 cents/message.) Surely too high for spammers but cheap enough for an app with a low message volume.
Well, I was responding to your claim that "it appears they became too tired of verifying/validating users to not send spam" is the reason for killing their low-volume free tier. It's a different story if they dropped the free tier to focus on large-volume customers.