My guess is this week will be an announcement and signup. I work in the space of tech deployments. It's good practice to test your Production deployment with some Production users (in this case likely beta testers) for a period of time before releasing it to the masses. Just sayin'...excitement doesn't necessarily mean it'll be the full deployment.
Also, as Mike Solitude127 would likely say, "free" software is an assumption. It's telling that they've never answered the question outright. My hunch is they'll have levels of service with one level being free. If they don't have a free offering they'll look greedy and it won't help sell the controller. I hope it's completely free but Neptune Sys is a business and those tend to like sales revenue. Fusion would mean that they're not limited in generating revenue by simply selling you a product with a one time fee...now they can generate subscription revenue as well. We'll see...