And I've updated the links inside that post to link to the archive.org versions of the old mailing list messages (which were lost in a Tragic Oh Shit That Machine Wasn't Included In The Backups accident a little while back):
The second of those two specifically gets into why "just buy icons instead of a paid account" won't work -- it would make us lose money in the long run, and probably make us have to lower the limits on other paid features, too. Since we set the paid account prices based on how much we thought it would cost us to keep the site running and what percentage of active users we thought would pay us, along with some fancy guesses at what percentage of people would use some/all/none of the various paid features that cost us more money to support, letting people just buy icons would disrupt that entire calculus. (Which has proven remarkably accurate over the past 8 years! Me of 2008 had a very accurate crystal ball, seriously.)
Basically, don't think of paid accounts as "buying these particular features"; think of them as more "you're paying us to keep the site running for everybody, and we give you access to a bunch of goodies to say thank you". (More the NPR/PBS pledge drive model than the feature subscription model, y'know?)
We know people don't always have a lot of spare cash on hand to buy a large chunk of paid time all at once, which is why we offer the 1-month and 2-month options (for $3 and $6, respectively) -- they're slightly more expensive over an entire year than the 6 and 12 month options, but only because we rounded up to whole numbers (since $35/12 would be $2.91 a month and $35/6 would be $5.83 a month, and that's just silly). We do wind up having a higher percentage of the smaller payments taken out in fees, since our payment processor charges us flat rate fee + percentage of the total amount for each transaction, but overall the difference isn't significant enough to make us drop the cheaper amounts of time and screw over people who can't afford to drop $35 all at once for the whole year.
no subject
https://web.archive.org/web/20131103030835/http://www.dwscoalition.org/lists/dw-discuss/2008-August/000514.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20120419073007/http://www.dwscoalition.org/lists/dw-discuss/2008-August/000538.html
The second of those two specifically gets into why "just buy icons instead of a paid account" won't work -- it would make us lose money in the long run, and probably make us have to lower the limits on other paid features, too. Since we set the paid account prices based on how much we thought it would cost us to keep the site running and what percentage of active users we thought would pay us, along with some fancy guesses at what percentage of people would use some/all/none of the various paid features that cost us more money to support, letting people just buy icons would disrupt that entire calculus. (Which has proven remarkably accurate over the past 8 years! Me of 2008 had a very accurate crystal ball, seriously.)
Basically, don't think of paid accounts as "buying these particular features"; think of them as more "you're paying us to keep the site running for everybody, and we give you access to a bunch of goodies to say thank you". (More the NPR/PBS pledge drive model than the feature subscription model, y'know?)
We know people don't always have a lot of spare cash on hand to buy a large chunk of paid time all at once, which is why we offer the 1-month and 2-month options (for $3 and $6, respectively) -- they're slightly more expensive over an entire year than the 6 and 12 month options, but only because we rounded up to whole numbers (since $35/12 would be $2.91 a month and $35/6 would be $5.83 a month, and that's just silly). We do wind up having a higher percentage of the smaller payments taken out in fees, since our payment processor charges us flat rate fee + percentage of the total amount for each transaction, but overall the difference isn't significant enough to make us drop the cheaper amounts of time and screw over people who can't afford to drop $35 all at once for the whole year.