I don't understand, are you talking about code hosting or simply just considering web services?

Regardless, hosting is a separate issue. You have open source projects who provide a piece of software that you're free to host yourself or pay somebody else to host for you. See for instance the Roundcube webmail.

It's similar to how I need to buy a computer to be able to run Emacs, that doesn't mean that Emacs itself is a product. Of course many web services are actual products and you pay for both the development and the hosting.

Here we're talking about a web browser though so the point is moot anyway.