Ask HN: What is the long term purpose of Google releasing free offline models?

The free models aren't as advanced as the commercial ones, so you still need to pay to get better service. Many companies do this by hosting the smaller models for free, and charging for access to the bigger ones, but the costs of running even the small models adds up, so if they can get you to run it on your own hardware, they save a lot on GPU time, but still get the advertising exposure of a freemium pricing plan.

...but i suspect few to none will continue releasing free and open models when they start cutting too deeply into token profits.

We'll likely see smaller open models, but few who have the resources to train large, frontier sized models will want to do so for free... maybe China, but they're also a dubious choice for many.