Comment by nxobject
What they mean by "academic" is fairly limited here, if LaTeX is the main writing platform. What are their plans for expanding past that, and working with, say Jane Biomedical Researcher with a GSuite or Microsoft org, that has to use Word/Docs and a redlining-based collaboration workflow? I can certainly see why they're making it free at this point.
FWIW, Google Scholar has a fairly compelling natural-language search tool, too.