Unfortunately, we can't offer icon add-ons to a free account (see the links in the entry for reasons why), and while we have considered a "paid account lite", it's just not practical. The cost of a paid account was set based on what we thought it would cost us to support each account per year and what we thought the percentage of paid accounts would be (see more old mailing list messages for how we arrived at those numbers), and offering a cheaper paid account option would skew those numbers (which have proven to hold up fairly well over time even though they were just projections) considerably. There's also the problem of decision fatigue, where people who are given too many choices will often choose none of them: two account types are confusing enough, and to have three would be even more confusing.
There's a bit of a glitch in the way people think of paid accounts (and, I mean, it's natural, and hard to work around, especially given our dual account structure), in that they think "oh, I'm paying $35 for $features_and_limits, I should be able to pay $35-x to get $features_and_limits-x", or, "why can't I pay $Z and decide which of the paid account features I want?" That isn't actually how paid account prices are set, and it's not how we price things and decide how each account gets how much of what. Paid accounts (icons aside) aren't really a case of "it costs us this much to offer this feature, so we could sell just that feature for that amount": paid accounts pay to subsidize the cost of doing business for all accounts, paid and free, and we give them access to the paid features (which are both "features that cost us money to offer" and "features that are popular, in order to entice people to paid accounts") as a thank you for subsidizing the cost of the service for everybody.
So, the $35/year for a paid account isn't "what it costs us to offer that collection of services and limits", it's "what it costs us to offer the service to everybody, calculated out over what percentage of accounts we think will pay us". A paid account would have to cost $35 whether it had 50 icons or 100 icons or 300 icons. (The $50 for the premium paid account reflects that some people do want to give us more money, and gets higher limits because of it.) Paid accounts are our only source of revenue (we have no outside investors, no third-party advertisers, and no venture capital), so we have to set our prices based on what it actually costs us to offer the service.
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There's a bit of a glitch in the way people think of paid accounts (and, I mean, it's natural, and hard to work around, especially given our dual account structure), in that they think "oh, I'm paying $35 for $features_and_limits, I should be able to pay $35-x to get $features_and_limits-x", or, "why can't I pay $Z and decide which of the paid account features I want?" That isn't actually how paid account prices are set, and it's not how we price things and decide how each account gets how much of what. Paid accounts (icons aside) aren't really a case of "it costs us this much to offer this feature, so we could sell just that feature for that amount": paid accounts pay to subsidize the cost of doing business for all accounts, paid and free, and we give them access to the paid features (which are both "features that cost us money to offer" and "features that are popular, in order to entice people to paid accounts") as a thank you for subsidizing the cost of the service for everybody.
So, the $35/year for a paid account isn't "what it costs us to offer that collection of services and limits", it's "what it costs us to offer the service to everybody, calculated out over what percentage of accounts we think will pay us". A paid account would have to cost $35 whether it had 50 icons or 100 icons or 300 icons. (The $50 for the premium paid account reflects that some people do want to give us more money, and gets higher limits because of it.) Paid accounts are our only source of revenue (we have no outside investors, no third-party advertisers, and no venture capital), so we have to set our prices based on what it actually costs us to offer the service.