I believe you only pay to your registrar. Check accounts on cryptofresh, if they have something like "Registrar openledger-reg", they were registered trough Openledger so they pay them. If you use the lightclient I believe you don't, however you might not have a faucet to register it so you'll need someone to send you the initial bts. I'm not sure though, give it a try.
As for
@clayop if those people are the ones bringing new people in, why shouldn't they benefit from it? What if no one was doing that? We wouldn't grow, at least not as fast definitely. I don't understand this it's like for you this is making the chain hostage.
I have already said countless times, these services are the ones bringing people in, it won't be you or me bringing a continuous stream of new users. It will be services. People alone won't try BitShares just "because". They will because they hear about services like OpenLedger. They are the ones who do all the marketing for the network. They are the ones who pay for that marketing. They are the ones spending time.
I don't know how you still think they are hurting the chain. Without incentive you think individual people will do that for you? That someone will loose the time , energy and money to do it? Yes, if you or me get someone to register, we are helping the network, but people won't come alone.
Users are not free. They need to be acquired. Customer acquisition has costs. It's not individuals like us who will bring in hundreds or thousands of users and provide a continuous stream of new users. Those same services you don't seem to want to help, will. Without that incentive you won't have new users.
What you seem to be forgetting is that if that same service didn't register that same user, that user would have
never joined BitShares or even heard about it.
I think your logic is completely twisted. But everyone is entitled to their own opinions.