People definitely ask us about that a lot, but unfortunately, we can't do it! Allowing free accounts to buy icons only would seriously mess with the disk space/bandwidth/server load calculations we did way back when we were designing the site's paid account structure and determining how much it would cost us to offer the site, and it would have the potential to seriously risk our ability to keep offering free accounts at all. (You can see two old mailing list messages I wrote back when we were in development that explain this a little better: #1, which explains why you can't buy paid features a-la-carte, and #2, which specifically gets into icons.)
There's a bit of a disconnect with how people think: they think things like, "I pay $35 a year for access to the paid features, so why can't I pay $35 - $10 and have access to fewer of the paid features?" -- thinking that paid accounts start at $35/year because that's what it costs us to offer the paid features. That's not how paid accounts work: we set our prices based on how much we thought it would cost us to support all accounts (paid and free) and what percentage of our userbase we thought would maintain paid accounts. Paid accounts subsidize the service for everyone.
User payments are our only source of income: we don't display advertising, don't accept venture capital, don't have any outside investors, and don't sell user data to marketers, so we have to be super careful about what we offer to people for free. Unlike most sites, we can't offer services that cost us a bunch of money to all accounts, paid and free, because we don't have advertisers or venture capitalists with deep pockets willing to bankroll free account usage. Icons are actually one of the more "expensive" things we can offer, in terms of disk space, bandwidth, and server processing power, and we have a lot of free accounts.
We definitely know that free users are interested in having more icon slots, and if and when we think we can responsibly offer them, we will increase the number of icons we offer for that account type. (We have to be responsible and conservative in how we do it, though.) We are extremely unlikely to ever allow free accounts to buy extra icon slots, but it's possible that in the future, as disk space and bandwidth gets cheaper and server processing power gets faster, we will be able to increase the number of icons a free account can use; I can't guarantee it, but it's possible.
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There's a bit of a disconnect with how people think: they think things like, "I pay $35 a year for access to the paid features, so why can't I pay $35 - $10 and have access to fewer of the paid features?" -- thinking that paid accounts start at $35/year because that's what it costs us to offer the paid features. That's not how paid accounts work: we set our prices based on how much we thought it would cost us to support all accounts (paid and free) and what percentage of our userbase we thought would maintain paid accounts. Paid accounts subsidize the service for everyone.
User payments are our only source of income: we don't display advertising, don't accept venture capital, don't have any outside investors, and don't sell user data to marketers, so we have to be super careful about what we offer to people for free. Unlike most sites, we can't offer services that cost us a bunch of money to all accounts, paid and free, because we don't have advertisers or venture capitalists with deep pockets willing to bankroll free account usage. Icons are actually one of the more "expensive" things we can offer, in terms of disk space, bandwidth, and server processing power, and we have a lot of free accounts.
We definitely know that free users are interested in having more icon slots, and if and when we think we can responsibly offer them, we will increase the number of icons we offer for that account type. (We have to be responsible and conservative in how we do it, though.) We are extremely unlikely to ever allow free accounts to buy extra icon slots, but it's possible that in the future, as disk space and bandwidth gets cheaper and server processing power gets faster, we will be able to increase the number of icons a free account can use; I can't guarantee it, but it's possible.