Questions about character sheets and functionality before I get started.

I have a group of friends who's looking to use Roll20 or another service to play RPGs online and I've decided Roll20 appears to be to best program for it, however I want to ask if multiple people can get full functionality out of a subscribed account while playing a game with that account tied to it. I'm not sure everyone interested in playing would be willing to pay the subscription fee and it appears from the descriptions that they would not be able to save their character sheets with the free account, which is another concern of mine. Is anyone aware of any issues playing with 1 subscribed account(the GM) and a few free accounts(the party)?

Roll20 is entirely free for everyone.  The limitations on your art Library are loose enough that you can easily manage custom art for a single campaign.  If you use the in-game image search tool, it doesn't count towards your storage limit. If the GM picks up Subscriber or Pro membership, the features and tools that opens to them is available to anyone playing their campaign.  The only exception to this is being able to access the full Roll20 tabletop over a mobile device (not the App... the actual site).  People need their own Supporter subscription for that. Character sheets (really character JOURNALS), are stored with the campaign.  The players without subscriptions just would not have the Character Vault feature, which lets them export/import a copy of their character into other games.

More information on the vault is  here .