Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's doubtful they'll ever charge for SOS. The "one year, one more year" thing is likely to make the accounting and liability work out. If they had just said "free for the life of the phone" it would have locked them into providing the service for many years, and required revenue deferral for many years. Easier to just under-promise.
That’s kind of what I expect. It will simply be free forever but maybe the other services that they might add in the future, such as iMessage over satellite, will cost extra. “A man got lost in the woods and died because he didn’t pay Apple two dollars a month“ is probably not a headline they want to see. It’s also possible they didn’t know how often it would end up getting used and so they said that is a hedge in ca…
They could just leave it enabled for everyone, and then retroactively charge them for a (moderately hefty) 1 year subscription if they end up using it.