Nope. Not going to happen. A HN user might, but regular user? No way in hell. Honestly I'd be surprised if you managed to win them over with $1/year or whatever the card minimum TX cost is. Even I was blindsided by it with a "wooah, whats this about" and I'm happy paying up for apps etc just to test them once. I thought I'd accidentally signed up to the website side of it
It's hard enough for Netflix to get customers to pay (account sharing) never mind a site that - from the user's point of view - does nothing
On the thought of the website side - Why would I as a website owner have my users pay your service when I could set up my own paywall and also enjoy the monetary rewards? I really feel like I've missed something here
Side note, there's also no way to delete my account
Incidentally, this is how RealPeople.io (https://realpeople.io) is able to have no ads because the revenue from RealPerson.io subsidizes it since they're owned by the same company.
I apologise for asking this rather than any actual followup questions but it's got me proper distracted
If your site ever gains traction then would quickly become rife with stolen credit card details as the amount is small enough that most banks wouldn't question it (at first at least - but it's small amounts like these that attackers use to verify the card details are still valid) and those attackers would get the added bonus of growing their database of fake user accounts, thus rendering the point behind your site irrelevant.
Worse still, you'd then need to find some way to differentiate between stolen details and legitimate accounts (you will legally need to do this otherwise you'd quickly get shut down) - which means you're back into the arms race against the bad actors. This is going to cost you money (hopefully not more than you're making but that really depends on how heavily you get targeted) and will mean you'll likely end up adding counter measures that add further hurdles for legitimate customers.
And thus we're all back to square one.
I do wish you luck with your endeavor; but I don't agree with you that this solves any of the problems you're hoping to address (or at least described in this thread - if your problem was merely to earn some extra cash on the side then this might work beautifully for you).
This is the primary way to prevent bots, but there still are secondary means like IP address, credit card, behavior pattern than can be used to detect bots. But with estimated millions of bots operating on Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere, the bot operators are not going to spend millions of dollars on RealPerson accounts.