Pirates of the Burning Sea will no longer have a required membership and will offer the complete PotBS experience to everyone.

from the Pirate of the Burning Sea Site..

What does Free to Play mean for the game?
Pirates of the Burning Sea will no longer have a required membership and we will offer the complete PotBS experience to everyone. We want to remove the monetary barrier to the game and instead offer ways to enhance your experience through micro-transactions. Micro-transaction items will be available at an in-game store. You’ll be able to purchase these items using Burning Sea Points that you can either acquire from other players or buy for real-world money. We are very interested in offering ways to help players make the parts of the game they like better and cut down on any time spent in between. Since we don’t want micro-transactions to be a barrier for gameplay, many items for sale will be aids for reaching maximum level and tools for starting out a PvP career. We won’t ever sell an item that lets you dominate the PvP game. We want to give all players access to the end game experience of PotBS and get them interested in the existing game systems so that the game can grow as a whole. That means that we will not be selling any outfittings, ships, etc that are clearly better than ones you can obtain through normal gameplay.

What does Free to Play mean for me?

Let’s assume you have not purchased PotBS before and are considering giving our game a shot when it becomes free-to-play. The new free accounts will be able to level to 50 and the accounts will have no end date. Free accounts will only have 2 character slots per nation, but if you like to play more classes or just like to play different characters, you can upgrade the number of characters slots on your account. The same thing goes for structure slots and dockyard slots, where again you’ll have two as standard. Our goal is to give anyone who creates an account a taste of everything in the game and let you choose how you want to expand on your experience. You will also have the option of joining the Captain’s Club. That’s our new name for subscriptions, and membership will grant you certain benefits, such as a bonus to all experience, loot chance, faction gained for kills, and a substantial discount for all items purchased with Burning Sea Points while you are a member. Captain’s Club members and anyone who has ever subscribed to PotBS will automatically have access to every account upgrade that free accounts do not have (i.e. character slots, structure slots, dockyard slots); we don’t want to take anything away from the players who have supported PotBS since we launched. The bottom line is that we want to offer the game to everyone for free while still making sure that our current and former subscribers are recognized for their support.

What do I have to look forward to?

What I discussed above is what it means for PotBS to switch from a subscription-only to a free-to-play model, but I haven’t yet touched on why you should be looking forward to micro-transactions. Our in-game store is called Treasure Aisle and the main thing it will offer is availability. No matter what port you are in, you now have goods available to you ranging from consumables and xp/loot/faction buffs to shoulder pets and clothing. We are even adding a number of new and unique items including follow pets and NPC allies for PvE content. We’ll be releasing more devlogs talking about some of these items in depth in the near future. We really think you guys are going to like the items we will be offering and we hope you tell your friends to try out Pirates of the Burning Sea for free. I’m sure you will still have a lot of questions, and we will try our best to answer them. We are still working some things out (i.e. how much real money Burning Sea Points will actually cost), so we might not have all of the answers right away.