My husband and I both pay $12/y each for access to a site that helps us decide on WoW gear upgrades. So a dollar per month. I would probably be willing to go around the same for hubski. But this still keeps out the poorer folk who rely on public internet facilities/hotspots and I really hate that they'd be excluded from here.

However, I suspect there would be people willing to sponsor others; maybe people would even throw in to a sponsorship pool -- $5/yr + $5 to the pool. Maybe a nominal amount from every paid subscription could get allocated to this?

But how do we know who we'd be ok sponsoring?

We could let newbies do shares and hubvotes but only make one comment a day, perhaps, and make it obvious that a badge would give sponsorship to people badging them. "+$" maybe. If paying contributors see someone who they want to keep around, but who hasn't paid up, they give them a badge, have the badge take the user cost/year value from the sponsorship pool and give them a month or a quarter or a year.

I dunno. I've been thinking about it for a while. Maybe it's silly.