Billing address information should be retained, regardless of purchase "cost" or if taxes are enabled/disabled globally on the site.
Customer details are wiped on free purchases and when store taxes are toggled.
As per this customer ticket (https://secure.helpscout.net/conversation/668779441/90705/), there is a bug with the customer address details being deleted in various situations.
Free Purchases
If you purchase a paid product, then go back and purchase a free product (going through the checkout), the next time you try to purchase a paid product the billing address details are no longer present in the customer record and need to be re-entered.
Similarly, if the site owner switches from using taxes to not using taxes, this also clears the customer billing details.
Let's verify how this is working in 3.0, I know customer address information has been handled a little differently, so worth a test to see if we've already resolved it.
Definitely replicated on master. Will check it out on release/3.0.
This appears to be taken care of in 3.0. Same replication steps do not wipe the Customer Address clean on the customer record. So I'd say all is well there.
@cklosowski Should this issue be saved for 3.0?
@SDavisMedia yeah, I've already milestone'd for 3.0 so I'll close it out as it's resolved in the release/3.0 branch.