People ask us this a lot! But there are many reasons we can't. The biggest is: we set the price for paid accounts by working out how much we thought it would cost us to run the site per year, and what percentage of active users were likely to pay for their accounts. (We were very very close on our guesses, too!) Paid accounts cost what they cost because that's how much it costs us to run the site for everybody, not because it costs us that much to offer the paid services to that account. Basically, about 10% of active users pay us to keep the site running for everyone, and we give them some extra stuff as a thank you. :)

I'll also point out that LJ hasn't raised their prices in seventeen years! (And in fact, they lowered them once: using automatically renewing payments costs $20, not $25.) If you look at inflation calculators, $25 in 2000 US dollars is $35.10 in 2017 US dollars, so we cost pretty much exactly what a year of paid time on LJ cost when paid accounts were first introduced. :)

There are many other reasons why we can't offer a cheaper option, but that's the big one. If people want to support us, but can't afford $35USD a year, they can just buy a few months of paid time for their account here and there when they have the money to spare. (Or buy paid time for somebody else as a gift, even!)