are free plans not free??

You can use the training plans for free, but you must be bronze member to use the future training plan feature (so you could print out the plan and use it, for instance).

It depends on what you are looking for and how you want to use it.  We have dozens of free sprint and oly plans.  We have a few detailed HIM and IM plans.  You just print them and use them.  That is how the free plans work.  Thousands of people have used them successfully.  You can even create custom gold sprint and oly plans, print them and start training for free.

I just verified this functionality...they are still free.  

But if you want to import them into your planned training log, etc, then a bronze membership is required as that is the part that costs the site a lot of money - to run the training logs.

Silver membership gives you access to more detailed plans at the maintenance level to HIM and IM levels.  Gold gives you access to all custom plans from sprint to IM with full details - and you don't necessarily need the training log here to use them.

I think the functionality you are looking for is how you interact with it with your training log (planned training, email workouts, graphs, etc) as you can still print the 'free' plans out and use them as-is.