Anderton
They were never free, you paid for them through the membership. I suspect the difference is that in the future, you can choose whether you want to pay for them or not.
I cannot imagine they would go for a model where you could chose between:
* A lifetime subscription, but without any goodies.
* The existing monthly/yearly subscription model, but with the extras.
That would be very confusing. Plus, then subscribing to the current lifetime subscription you would have to be very aware about the consequence. I have not seen the full mail (on p.3 it appears to only be an excerpt) so I'm not sure whether they really clearly point out that going for the lifetime subscription removes stuff that you would still have with the regular subscription model.
I would just think that they go for the core functionality only regardless of lifetime vs monthly, but that they therefore would significantly lower the monthly subscription price.