Honestly, there’s been a lot less friction than was anticipated, and the take-up of premium plans has been far above anything I was expecting. I tend to estimate on the cautious side (that way any deviation is likely to be a pleasant surprise), but honestly, in just the first 7 days, the number of folks I hear have signed up for premium plans is many times what I was expecting. Also, a far greater proportion of them have been going for the Pro Plan or higher.
In fact, somewhere among all the discussions there’s one where I put in writing that I expected the Plus Plan to be the one most went for, and instead, 80% were signing up for the Pro Plan. (Simply put, even while the Pro Plan is 4 times the price of the Plus Plan, it’s still just $20, which as a business investment is laughably negligible in real terms)
As someone with very close to 30 years of experience in Online Marketing, across virtually every market, and every company size and structure, going from Free to even $1 is usually far more resisted and unpopular. But so long as a ‘Freemium’ model offers an effective way to get a product out and “taste-tested” to create demand, before expecting people to pay for a commercial product they have no knowledge of, it is going to continue to be effective, and oft-used.
In fact, the problem of people trying to commit credit card fraud to sign-up is probably many magnitudes larger than the rather vocal minority (a really tiny minority) who think everything should be Free, rather than just that the basics should be free, and premium extras most don’t need should have a cost to justify continuing to support and develop those things that few use.
I say ‘probably’ because, as I have stated elsewhere, I’m just a volunteer moderator for the community, and am not an employee, nor paid freelancer, of AIPRM. I’m not here because of duty, or contracts, and nobody pulls my strings. In fact, one of the reasons I took up the job was that Christoph openly asked me to moderate him too if it were ever needed.
So, my being here is either (a) a mark of how much Christoph trusts and respects my judgement and opinions, or (b) I’m here because having it almost in my ‘job description’ to keep Christoph in line is something I couldn’t resist. 
Something you won’t often hear a marketer say, never mind explain, is that ‘Money’ is actually a very poor unit of value or incentive. It’s used because it is easy. But the only use money has is that you can exchange it for things that you want, that you value more. And that’s the thing. There was something that any person valued more, that could have been bought for that money. And so there is something they valued just as much, that could have been bought for less.
Crazy sounding, and yet patently obvious the second it is pointed out. Of course, unless you have a very tight and uniform demographic, the thing one values more than X amount of money won’t be the same as the thing another values as much. Money isn’t so much valuable, as simply more agreed on. A ‘unit of trade’ in more ways than one.
Coming from all these years in Online Marketing, buying the kind of brand exposure, or fame (or links) that one might get from simply creating a prompt that tens of thousands of people use is worth a lot, lot, lot more than any amount of money we could reasonably offer. Not to everyone, of course. After all, if someone has no brand, what value in giving that non-existant brand more exposure? If someone has no use for fame or popularity, then getting fame and popularity isn’t much incentive. But if someone isn’t interested in brand exposure, fame, or popularity, then why are they wanting to share prompts at all? Altruism? If so, they don’t want or need any reward anyway.
But if we pay cash for prompt authors, we create an economy, and if there is an economy, there will be fraudsters and crooks trying to exploit it. Even more than those who already were attempting every imaginable kind of exploit just to get the free links or free publicity. There was a lot of that for a while, though of course the AIPRM team evolved many levels and types of counter-measure to catch and eliminate such abuse.
The long years of success of Open-source projects tends to tell us that money doesn’t necessarily make better products, and it almost never does outside of actual paid work with proper wages and so forth. The evidence that paying successful prompt writers would result in better prompts just doesn’t have any evidence or support - not in the real world. Sad, but a reality.
Anyone who wants to be a professional prompt engineer would find it hard to find a better method of getting started than to create their own website (or Patreon page) with a few, really specialized and high-value prompts, and use AIPRM to get the links and brand awareness to their site or Patreon page with other, widely popular but perhaps not as valuable or specific prompts.
Anyway, you asked for thoughts, and those are mine. I’ll ‘yield the floor’ to other opinions and viewpoints. Welcome to the community.
