I might pay it. But I'm not clear on how it would work for you financially. First of all, your post title asks about a small monthly fee, but in the post itself you seem to focus on the $97. I think you might get more business if you let people do either one. The small monthly fee would be a pain in the ass to administer, but I'm thinking you might get more takers if the threshold is lower than $97. Then there are people like me who would rather just pay the full amount and be done with it.
Presumably, someone would pay the $97 because they see a chance of earning much more from the referrals. Does that work out for you financially, given the referral fees? I guess my real question there is, do you need some greater scale (lots of people paying in) or is each user essentially self-supporting?
You could call it a membership fee (or something similarly plain) just so that no one in government believes you are running a Ponzi type scheme. I actually have a healthy respect for pyramid structures when it comes to referral fees; to my knowledge, no one has come up with a more powerful marketing reward system, as all the Amways of the world figured out and many Fortune 1000 companies emulated long ago. But you have to be careful that no one thinks you're running an unsustainable Ponzi scheme.
Could there be any play as far as creating a UIA or doing some crowdfunding to kick this off, to the point where you had a big enough pool of money to fund/incentivize x number of participants?