Hey Dirk,
With recent changes here on Itch for adult games, we've had to approach releasing content here a bit differently. With these changes, we wanted the game to be available to everyone, especially new people discovering it. We still operate on several other sites, Patreon being our primary platform.
Our schedule for releases is:
The Alpha build of a new version is released at the start of each month. About a week later the Beta build is released. Then after another week the Early Access version is released. Then about a month later this version goes free and public. This is the Patreon schedule (and as previously mentioned due to changes here on Itch, you'll see it land here later than Patreon).
The game has and will always be free, it just takes a tad bit of time for the free version(s) to release.