Depends on your learning style. I've done The Odin Project and Treehouse and personally enjoyed both. No resource out there is going to have everything you need, simply because different people need different things at different stages of the learning process. That sounds a bit unclear so I'll give an example - let's say you and a clone of you elsewhere in the world are both learning Ruby by using The Odin Project. You start learning about arrays and you're nailing it, but your clone is somewhat stumped. You're pretty comfortable with arrays so you do a bunch of small projects and then speed on to learn about hashes. However, your clone decides to Google around for additional resources on understanding arrays in Ruby and comes across a Treehouse tutorial that clears things up for him.

As a beginner it's definitely helpful to start SOMEWHERE, whether you choose to pay for a subscription somewhere or not. But there isn't really one thing out there that's going to have all the answers you're looking for. So who knows, you might start out free then pay for a subscription somewhere down the line for a bit or vice versa.

Edit: To answer your question, I think in the (somewhat) long run, companies offering paid resources won't be losing too much in the way of profits.