Yeah, the issue with permanent accounts is the fact that it's a quick infusion of capital and then you can never count on getting money from that person ever again! (I say "count on" because a bunch of our seed account holders do keep paying us out of principle because they want to keep supporting us -- they're the people who took the biggest gamble on us at the very beginning and the people who have been our biggest supporters all along -- but you can't rely on that.) When we sold seed accounts at launch, we limited them to "what we think we'll need for our first year's operating expenses" and we were hoping we'd never need to sell them again, but then about a year in we had that four-ish months we couldn't take any payments at all because PayPal and Google Checkout were having vapors at us about oh noes adult content and it took us a while to find a payment processor who'd take us. So we did have an extra seed account sale after that, because that ate into our reserves bigtime, and we wanted to make sure that we replenished them. But we've said all along that the only time we'd ever sell seed accounts again is if we're in a similarly dire level of "we just ate through an uncomfortable amount of the runway money we had on hand"!

The issue with "pay a few dollars a month for an extra thing" (icons, disk space, custom userheads, etc) is that it's actually really, really hard to crowbar into our existing payment and account structure system, which we mostly inherited from LJ. The way LJ used to do it was this really complicated system of pro-rating costs and doing something completely fucky with paid account expiration dates and add-on package expiration dates, and I have managed to blessedly block most of it out of my brain because it was the source of about 50% of payment-related support volume and actually probably lost money when you took into account that we had to hire another FTE dedicated to payment-related issues because the support volume was just that high. The transactions were also really small, and a greater percentage of small transactions are eaten up by processor fees because every payment processor charges a base rate in addition to the percent of the transaction.

We could maybe design a better way of doing it if we tried really, really hard, because having the points system does give us a little more wiggle room, but there's a really good reason why extra icon slots are a one-time payment and not a recurring payment even though technically the cost only covers a few years' worth of storing and serving the image files and some people use a paid-for icon slot for longer than those few years, because oh my ears and whiskers did I not want to ever deal with that pro-rating system ever again. We had people on LJ who had different icon slots expiring every few days because they'd buy 10 slots, wait a few days, buy 10 more slots, etc, etc, and it was a goddamn nightmare to figure out whenever someone thought they hadn't gotten what they'd paid for. (This is also why, even though you don't have to keep paying for your icon slots, you can only use them if you have a paid account: we still have the cost of storing expired icons, but that way we only have the cost of serving them if you've paid us recently.)

Basically, add-on services like that sound great, and sometimes (ie bonus icon slots) they can work if you can wrangle it so that they're permanent but still tied to having a paid account, but it's really easy to wind up in the position where you're in a goddamn support nightmare over it. And given that it involves payment info, it's the kind of goddamn support nightmare that would have to be handled by basically me, because we limit access to the payment processor dashboard because of how much sensitive info is in it, and I am just at complete capacity most of the time these days. (We trust karzilla enough to give her access to that, but she also has more than enough to do and she doesn't need to be adding more, heh.)