Why the PIO account?

I was interested in running Pio remote on my local network to be able to use remote device monitoring. However, it seems one needs an account in order to do that. I fail to see the need for this situation? Can someone explain why addding an external dependency and/or sharing whatever info with PIO is a good idea?

I saw a similar question from someone else where the answer was ‘create an AUTH key’ but that still requires the creation of an account first…

Ah never mind. I see PIO remote is a paid service. That explains it.