I think now is a great time to remind everyone, like sync’s developer, Lemmy’s developers need to be paid too! The amount of time all the devs put into making lemmy exist, in my opinion, should be worth some of your money. If you can afford it, donating to the people who develop lemmy and/or the people keeping your home instance up will accelerate the incredible growth of lemmy!
I agree that subscription fatigue is a huge thing, and I avoid services as a rule of thumb unless there are real reasons for the subscription, ie ongoing usage based costs.
That said, I view $2 a month as a reasonable subscription cost, and if Reddit had charged that I would have happily paid it to keep bacon reader. It’s only the one time payment cost that is very steep ($99).
I chip in $5/mo for lemmy.world to help pay to keep it ad free and running