There's a large gulf between users who will play nothing and users who will pay something. If you start charging you have to account for how much of the user ba

There's a large gulf between users who will play nothing and users who will pay something. If you start charging you have to account for how much of the user base will leave just for there being any cost at all. If you're using Paypal or similar for transactions you lose 39 cents out of each $1 yearly transaction (and if you run your own merchant account now you have to secure credit card information). Additional customer service overhead having to deal with people's $1 yearly transactions, on top of people expecting better responsive customer service because they're paying customers now, maintaining private customer data ... the variable costs per customer would probably end up more than $1. It'd be cheaper, literally, to make it free. Maybe $5 a year could work as a price point, and given the gulf between Pay Nothing vs Pay Something, I doubt $5 a year would've lowered the conversion enough to make $1 a year transactions worth it. Don't do credit card transactions for a dollar or less unless you're counting on it converting into a higher amount a month later.