I personally perceived freebitcoin only as a faucet when I first learned about this site. I remember freebitcoin had a lot of advertising banners, and I guess this type of advertising was one of the main sources of its income at that time. So the fact that freebitcoin managed to grow from a regular faucet to a gambling site with a multimillion audience is really impressive.
That's actually true, freebitcoin is one of the longest running faucet out here on the crypto market and by far the most successful one. If you're one of the users of freebitcoin way back, you'll know how high the coins they are giving out as it was based on the price of bitcoin. I remember that the highest jackpot was around 1 bitcoin and I'm not sure if anyone was able to receive that.
Anyways, as far as I know, fb has always been a gambling/faucet platform since the multiply dice game has always been there.
I think base reward for faucet before was around 300-400 satoshis hourly. It's about 0,06$-0,09$ hourly in currently rates just by using this single faucet. They were one of the most rewarding faucets during the golden era of fauceting.
By using a few dozen of faucets hourly it was possible to build big income thinking on long term. For who didn't have money to invest in crypto, it was the perfect beginning. That was the kind of opportunity which isn't available these days anymore for the newbies of our present time.
I used to claim faucets back then and I had hit 9999 too, and I also remember that many people were complaining about those ads so the owner decided to completely remove them. Furthermore post that they slowly and steadily added new features, and irrespective of the economic conditions they always continued making payments which is why I can always vouch for them.