Disagree. This is something you should have to pay for, especially given their promise to keep your stuff online forever. Paying makes the business model clear; a free plan starts to muddy the waters and certainly is no benefit to paying users or the company.
There are plenty of places to post for free if you don't care about keeping your stuff around forever. You get what you pay for after all.
I see how having a free demo account might be helpful for trying out the service, but a permanently free account is totally contrary to the idea of posthaven.
Really though, paying $5 to try it out isn't a huge deal if you don't like the service -- you can cancel whenever. I'd rather see development of useful features than the devs worrying about a free demo thing. Because of the way it's structured, a free trial doesn't benefit the company or paying users -- growth is not the goal, sustainability is.
Bottom line: I don't think this is the right place for people unwilling to put $5 toward an awesome idea/business model. You can go use tumblr or blogger or whatever.
But it's not a company; it's a non-profit (or is going to be one). I don't think the goal here is to get big; it's to be self-sustaining, and a free plan doesn't do that.
A free trial version would be useful for people interested in checking it out. I'd rather have it feature limited to the point that it's unsuitable for long term use than have to remember to cancel a "free for one month" trial account.
A nice thing about not having a free plan is you don't have to deal with cheap free users. Someone who's paying you $60/year is invested in the service and wants to see it succeed.
