"If the service is free, you are the product."
$50/year does not seem outrageous if one uses the site regularly. However, I'm going to be very miffed if, after paying, my posts are still auto-edited to insert links that I did not put there.
I pay $25/year for an ad-free
www.coasterbuzz.com, but that's partly becuase that site would probably not exist without the people who pay for it, because it is not a large enough community to sustain itself on ad revenue, and I want to support the proprietor. That also nominally gives me the ability to sign up for enthusiast events but I haven't been to one of those since before the lockdown, and each year fewer parks have them.
I don't remember what I paid for TourGuideMiKE each year, but that had gotten to the point where I was paying just to be part of the community, because the TGM folks were my peeps until the site finally died. I would have paid Josh/EasyWDW, for the same reason, but he never had a paid option other than "buy the book."
I pay $25/month for ad-free/privacy-preserving search on
kagi.com, plus metered access to a variety of LLMs that I can use without having them harvest my text for training purposes. Highly recommended. They also built the browser I use by default (Orion) which is also a privacy-first product. It works on about 90-95% of the web sites I visit, and getting better as time goes on.
And that's consistent with my media consumption generally. I pay for SiriusXM ($3/month!) for ad-free/human-programmed music, and I buy the ad-free tiers when I am signed up for a streamer. And I throw $100/year at my local public radio station wemu.org.
