09. Why Do We Have To Pay For A Membership? Why No Free Trial Period?

There are three reasons that this website costs money.

Reason 1

On the old Christian Gays Connections website I gave a 7 Day Free Trial Period.  Unfortunately that encouraged many "less than desirables" to register with us.  Many were spammers.  A lot were frauds.  Some were sexually explicit with their profile content and pictures.  All of this led to many, many hours of work on my part to keep the website "clean".  

A PayPal Account assures us that the member is who they say they are, and by charging money, even as little as $2/mo, we will eliminate the frauds and scammers, and will get quality people who sincerely want to connect with our LGBTIQ Community.

Reason 2

I received a lot of comments that our old Connections site had a lot of "inactive profiles".  This is true.  Some people registered and never came back, but I didn't want to delete their profiles in case they wanted to come back some day.  Some people changed their email addresses and didn't update on the website.  

By charging people monthly, the website will only have people who are truly interested.  Nobody is going to keep paying for something they are not using.

Reason 3

This website resides on a server.  Servers cost money, and the bigger the server, the more money.  By charging a minimum amount of money for memberships, it will help to offset the cost of the server and the software.