Let's clear up a whole slew of misconceptions.
1) Essentially the belief that "this isn't working". We would wildly disagree. Remember, the supporter bar... "Shows relative number of current subscribers, versus what's needed to run the service." So, we're regularly adding free users, and we're adding subscribers at a faster RATE than the free users for the bar to be growing. Tomorrow marks the beginning of the tenth week of subscriptions, and the bar is moving nicely into the second section marked "allows us to work on Roll20 in our spare time". Which means we're passing the threshold where if things continue as they have (and we have no reason yet to believe they won't), we as developers are able to safely make some money from Roll20 instead of setting it all aside for future operating costs.
2) The "PayPal" question. I'm not sure where we talked about this on the Mentor forums (feel free to correct me), but I do believe we've discussed this publicly and on the supporter podcast-- PayPal is the worst. As a developer, it's a nightmare. It's not setup for subscriptions (programming it for recurring transactions is not at all stable), its customer service is dreadful, and it gives us very little ability to automatically track what's going on. What we're selling at Roll20 is software as a service... and you expect it to be running in the future, right? Which means we need to be able to plan and to track in-house; how many of what sorts of subscriptions are active, bringing in what sort of income? PayPal is AWFUL to deal with, and we are NOT alone in this opinion. Businesses as large as Blizzard still have a great deal of restrictions on their PayPal use, particularly internationally. We have no desire to have our small team spend our time chasing these problems. Stripe, on the other hand, has been fantastic. They're a joy to work with, easy to program for, AND they are incredibly secure (seriously... go Googling to hunt for Stripe being breached). So, this is where we stand now and for the foreseeable future.
3) "This service costs too much." I don't own Apple products, because I think they cost too much. Others obviously disagree with me. There's never going to be a cost that works for everyone. That said, a growing amount of people seem to be okay with our pricing outline thus far AND we have every intention to sweeten the pot. The phrase you'll see us use again and again is "no brainer"-- we want this subscription to be an obvious choice for a plethora of gamers. But, again, the subscriptions have only been active for ten weeks. We did not expect to be perfect for everyone in that time. And we also don't want anyone to be paying for our service that doesn't think it's right for them yet. So you are welcome to wait, as we continue to improve Roll20.
And, as an aside, artists on the Marketplace are already contributing a percentage of sales to Roll20. While that percentage is not much in our grand scheme of things, we think that keeping artists happy and well paid means more content for the community and we are pleased with that business model thus far.
All that said, are we looking for ways to make more money? Sure. I don't have a yacht yet, dammit. But I didn't expect one at this point, and things are progressing according to a plan. If you don't like the plan, there are lots of other virtual tabletops out there. I don't think any of them are as easy to use and I'm certain none of them have as robust and growing a community. But they're there. Over here-- we're going to stick to our plan first and foremost, and then listen to those who are already paying us as a close second concern. Beyond that, those who are actively taking time to complain about pricing are only taking away time in my day that could be spent on bettering Roll20.
