No, we will never make it possible to buy only icon slots without a corresponding paid account. It basically boils down to, allowing it would completely destroy our business model! It would allow people to pay once and then continue using the icons forever without ever paying us again, and icons are a) one of our major drivers of paid accounts, and b) expensive for us to serve (both in terms of the bandwidth they require and in the sense that the more icons people have, the less likely they are to be cached, so large numbers of icons = more server load). The only reason we can allow people to buy extra icons, much less extra icon slots that are permanent (and not for a limited amount of time the way LJ does it) is because they require a paid account; otherwise we'd be taking on extra costs without any guarantee of income that would help us pay it. Requiring a paid account guarantees that we'll be receiving some income from the person who's using the extra icon slots or else the extra icon slots go away (and lower the costs).
Lots of people want only access to certain paid account features (usually icons) for cheaper, but our paid accounts aren't priced based on what the paid account features cost us to offer to just that account; they're priced to cover what our pre-launch calculation of the cost of offering the service for all active users would be, divided out by our projections of what percentage of active users would be paid. (Even over 8 years those projections are still pretty darn accurate, too!) People pay us to operate the whole site for everyone, and the paid account features are a thank you for doing that and a way for us to make paid accounts more appealing. So, any "paid account light" that only had a subset of the paid account features would have to cost exactly what a full-feature paid account would.
We don't show advertising, haven't taken any venture capital, and don't have any outside investors, precisely so people know that our only priority is y'all rather than advertisers or investors -- and the reason we can do that is because we're very careful about what we offer and how we offer it, and make it appealing for people to pay us!
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Lots of people want only access to certain paid account features (usually icons) for cheaper, but our paid accounts aren't priced based on what the paid account features cost us to offer to just that account; they're priced to cover what our pre-launch calculation of the cost of offering the service for all active users would be, divided out by our projections of what percentage of active users would be paid. (Even over 8 years those projections are still pretty darn accurate, too!) People pay us to operate the whole site for everyone, and the paid account features are a thank you for doing that and a way for us to make paid accounts more appealing. So, any "paid account light" that only had a subset of the paid account features would have to cost exactly what a full-feature paid account would.
We don't show advertising, haven't taken any venture capital, and don't have any outside investors, precisely so people know that our only priority is y'all rather than advertisers or investors -- and the reason we can do that is because we're very careful about what we offer and how we offer it, and make it appealing for people to pay us!